I'm not confident about the Olympics regenerating the area, jno.
I suspect the Olympic circus will take advantage of the area, and then leave it to it's own devices, with a huge commercial infrastructure that it can't afford to support.
All the new shops will start closing, and it will become a ghost town.
Unless there are some ABers who will tell me that, although they don't live in the area, they will make a trek to Stratford to go shopping.
I'm definitely going to have a nosey next week when all the fuss has died down. My husband worked on the Aquatics centre at Stratford and we went on a family day to see it before the handover, it's very impressive but I don't know how they will able to fund such a pool after the Olympics, no expense was spared, the pumps and filtration systems are state of the art, the floor of the pool moves up and down to make it shallower. That being said it was massively impressive to see it, just hope it works out for the local people.
Just a personal opinion - stratford was getting to be a hole anyway but this new shopping centre will just make the existing hole deeper - it will kill trade outside it and it's already on it's last legs
it's aimed at getting continental traffic too (as are Lakeside and Bluewater, being near the motorway from the ferry ports to London). Given the strength of the euro at present, they'll be expecting French shoppers - if the Eurostar can stop there. It is supposed to but I'm not sure they've actaully worked this out yet.