See London’s East End Before It Ends
First off, I apologize for the lame title to this blog posting. Now that that’s behind me; East London (and more specifically, Stratford) is being handed the incredibly well choreographed and impossible-to-match Olympic torch from China in four years, which spells trouble for this immigrant neighborhood of over 1.5 million (take a look at a before and after photo of Beijing’s Olympic Green).
But for some, it’s an opportunity to show off an up-and-coming area that’s used to being overlooked by most travelers (and most Londoners at that). The NYT takes a look at some of what makes this neighborhood tick, from art centers to gastropubs. I’ll be more impressed with the neighborhood when I see 2,008 Tai Chi masters performing choreographed movements on a giant LCD screen there.