‘Go and see the area now so that you can compare it later,’ said Mayor of London Ken Livingstone in 2005 when London won the bid to stage the 2012 Olympic Games.
Photographers Marion Davies and Debra Rapp did just that.
Their pictures are displayed appropriately at the new V&A East Museum in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Dispersal: Picturing urban change in East London is on The V&A East Museum top floor where there is a panoramic view of the Lower Lea Valley and the area where the photos were taken.
The contrast between then and today is dramatic.
Marion took colour photos whilst Debra shot in black and white.
Their work is displayed in a vast cool minimilist gallery.
But some of the work on site twenty years ago was often not without heat. Car repairs, involving battered cars which would never see the road again, are not a surprise. Less seen at the time was the person deboning meat amidst a pile of ribcages for mince production.
The famous salmon company H Forman & Son has survived on a new site in modern premises and
the Royal Opera House which had a workshop by the River Lea, opposite Fish Island, has also stayed on in a another new building nearby.
Marion shows the precarious moves needed pre-Olympics to get salmon out of cold store and painters working on the set for Carmen laid out on the floor.
Debra shows an intriguing photo of the towpath passing under the Northern Outfall Sewer now rebranded as The Greenway.
Recorded and also missing today are the pylons still found higher up the river.
The photographers undertook a lonely job against the clock and the result is the only record of how this now green area once looked and what happened there before it had world attention.
A visit to the V&A East Museum top floor is free and rewarding. The exhibition continues until Sunday 18 October.
IMPORTANT NOTE
There are two new V&A sites in the Park. The V&A East Museum should not be confused with the V&A East Storehouse also in the Olympic zone but near Hackney Wick. The V&A East Museum is at East Bank, 107 Carpenters Rd, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford, London E20 2AR nearer to the shopping centre.
