With her cool elegance,  Grace Kelly epitomised both the glamour of Hollywood and allure of European royalty. An icon of the 20th century, her treasured clothes and accessories that embodied the look of the times have long been safeguarded at her palace in Monaco. Now they are winging their way here.

LIFE AND STYLE COVER STORY

MONTE CARLO

IT ALMOST didn’t happen, that first meeting between the actor Grace Kelly and the man who was to turn her life into a fairytale, Prince Rainier of Monaco. It had been set up by a French magazine as a photo opportunity during the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.
First, Kelly’s schedule was so frantic that she was tempted to cancel. Then her hotel suffered a power cut so she could not dry her hair or iron a frock.
The queen of Hollywood improvised. She pulled her hair back and wore her least-wrinkled outfit, a lush floral silk taffeta made from a McCall’s dress pattern that was quite different from her usual sleek look.
That evening she told Olivia de Havilland that Rainier was “charming, a very charming man indeed”. Her current love was consigned to oblivion. Within a year, aged only 26, she had had “the wedding of the century” and was elevated to Her Serene Highness — a title well suited to her trademark cool loveliness.
Royalty had long been her aim. As a child growing up in an Irish Catholic family in Philadelphia, she once told her sister Peggy, “I’m going to be a princess.”
Even as a child, she had been unruffled by life’s ups and downs. Her other sister, Lizanne, once locked her in a cupboard. Kelly did not cry or bang to get out. She sat inside and contentedly played with her dolls for hours. “She seemed to have been born with a serenity the rest of us didn’t have,” Lizanne said years later.
That self-possession was part of Kelly’s allure. Add regal bearing, deep blue eyes, a classically beautiful face the camera caressed and a distant gaze — not so much superior as unfocused, her short-sightedness corrected by thick horn-rimmed glasses in private — and you have the basis of the Kelly look that would so entrance a generation of filmgoers, photographers and directors, including Alfred Hitchcock.
He used her in three of his films — Dial M for Murder, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief — and said she had “sexual elegance” and resembled “a snow-covered volcano”: cool on the outside but with the suggestion of raging hot torrents within. It was a good analogy, judging by Kelly’s own remarks on her sexuality to her friend and biographer, Gwen Robins: “She just adored sex. She made no bones about it. We were lying on the bed one day and I said something about sex and she said, ‘It’s heaven.”‘ She told someone else it “put lights” in her eyes.
But Kelly understood that mystery was needed for mystique. She was discreet and tenaciously private about personal matters. Her active love life was a secret until after her death. It was customary in those days for the studios to release the body measurements of their stars; Kelly refused.
She carefully cultivated a picture that smoothed over any rough edges in her history. A book put out by the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco quotes her as saying that her family always trusted her choices and supported her career: “There was no such thing as a bad profession for them.”
Not so, says one of her bridesmaids, who later wrote a book on Kelly that said her father, Jack, thought acting was “a slim cut above street-walking”.
This already delectable package had to be fashionably packaged by Hollywood and it is the clothes that were created for her films and her public appearances that really launched the signature Kelly style. Left to her own devices when young, she dressed like the preppy private schoolgirl she had been: wool skirts, cashmere cardigans, pearls and little heels (at more than 1.65 metres, she was considered tall for an actress).
She worked out when modelling early in her 20s that she looked best with her hair pulled back off her square face and stuck firmly to that policy thereafter.
She did not flaunt. Even as a star, she would wear figure-hugging evening frocks but avoided overly revealing clothes; her breasts were always discreetly covered and she disliked short skirts when they later came into vogue (“After all, who has pretty knees?” she asked.)
She became known for classic understatement and clean lines. The waists were cinched, the skirts often full, the shoulders either bare or wispy with chiffon. Floaty fabrics conjured up feminine archetypes: the goddess, the sprite, the dancer. Her look was more adult than Audrey Hepburn’s gamine but not as sultry as Sophia Loren’s highlighting of Mediterranean curves.
Writing in Vanity Fair, Laura Jacobs says, “In To Catch a Thief and High Society, references abound to both classical draping and classical dance … Grace’s gowns are columnar, with waterfall pleats and cascades fluting, sheer trains flowing down from the back (where wings would be, if she had them) and sheer scarves like soft breezes around her neck …
“Grace’s day dresses have fitted bodices and skirts blossoming from the waist — a very clever fusion of the ballerina’s tutu with the American shirtwaist and a shape that allowed her to move freely (as she did in the sensational flowered shirtwaist of Rear Window, in which she climbed a fire escape). As for colour, Grace was given her own Apollonian palette. Wheat-field and buttercup yellows, azure and cerulean blues, seashell pink and angel-skin coral, Sun King gold and Olympus white — no one wore white like Grace Kelly.”
Except, perhaps, Marilyn Monroe in the iconic image with white sunray pleats billowing over a New York subway grating.
Kelly’s clothes from both her Hollywood and her Monaco days now reside in a small, fluorescent-lit basement room in the bowels of the palace on the rock in Monte Carlo that has been inherited by her son, Prince Albert, and his new wife with the uncertain smile, Princess Charlene.
Rack upon colourful rack of haute couture and home-made ball gowns, suits and dresses stand covered in white dustcloths, the air around them dehumidified and the temperature chilled to help preserve them. Shoes, hats, gloves and bags are wrapped in tissue. Everything is tagged with information about its designer, the year of origin and the major occasions upon which it was worn.
While it is clear the 1970s were unkind even to princesses — jewelled caftans could work in no other era and it could be argued they didn’t work even then — prowling the racks cannot help but produce crows of delight. Here, the pale blue frock in which she was photographed for High Society with Bing Crosby on one arm and Frank Sinatra on the other; there, a magnificent, 19th-century-style, full-skirted black net gown with gold embroidery she wore to a ball themed “1900”.
Many of the most famous items have been touring the world as part of an exhibition on Kelly’s life that is now in Toronto. An Australian version is due to be opened by Princess Charlene in Bendigo next month.
The exhibits will include a copy of her wedding dress, which had a 21-inch (53-centimetre) waist, and the original of the beautifully cut navy coat and cream shift she wore when landing in Monaco after crossing the sea with 66 family and friends and a media posse for her much-trumpeted wedding of the century (“the carnival of the century,” she dubbed it wryly).
The original wedding dress is now too fragile to travel. It was styled by Hollywood designer Helen Rose, who had fashioned her delicious frocks in the musical comedy High Society, and took 35 people six weeks to make. MGM had promised to let Kelly have the High Society wardrobe if she let the studio provide the wedding dress and film the ceremony.
It was the William and Kate wedding of its time, with 1800 journalists accredited to cover it and a live broadcast watched by 30 million people in Europe.
The Duchess of Cambridge last year paid homage to Kelly’s frock with her own wedding dress, which was also tightly waisted with a similar lace bodice and full skirt.
Kelly became pregnant with her first child, Caroline, on the honeymoon and that led to another fashion classic. She bought a large handbag from Hermes that she carried in front of her bump, pregnant bellies not yet having become a fashion accessory in their own right.
And thus “the Kelly bag”, which has been copied and tweaked in many ways since, was created.
The original, in tan leather, will be part of the Bendigo exhibition. So will a small, prettily worked tapestry bag that Kelly carried the night she won an Academy Award for The Country Girl in 1955 and to the official “reception of wedding gifts” after her marriage.
The basement collection is presided over by Kelly’s former palace wardrobe mistress, Maryel Girardin. She worked for the Monaco palace for 50 years, 25 of them with Kelly. She was the princess’s embroiderer and linen supervisor overseeing a staff of 30 and later worked as her seamstress, too.
Kelly was casual and spontaneous in her everyday life, Girardin says. She would roll up bare of make-up, in everyday clothes, carrying a Vogue pattern she wanted made up or asking for a special little something from Girardin’s nimble fingers, such as an embroidered apron to be part of a Monagasque national dress.
One of the special requests was a full-length coat in red and gold brocade, which Girardin made up for her from a sketch and from fabric that Kelly had already found. “She always knew exactly what she wanted,” Girardin says. “She was always very certain.”
Girardin had come to France at the age of 10 from Vietnam, orphaned by war and raised by nuns in a religious institution. She dislikes talking about that. “I don’t look back,” she says briefly. Thanks to Kelly, she says, she has had a happy life and seen many marvellous things, such as the glittering banquets laid out for special functions. She helped raise the princess’s children; Kelly wanted her in the nursery, too.
She performs a different kind of labour of love now. It was Girardin who, on Prince Rainier’s orders, gathered all Kelly’s clothes together after her death. She helps curators assemble and display them for exhibitions and she made Kelly’s replica wedding dress. Photographing clothes for The Saturday Age, Girardin knows just how to make them sit well with the help of a pin here or a judiciously placed fistful of tissue paper there. Some are wearing thin with age or developing age-related stains and Girardin has a rescue plan for each one.
After her marriage Kelly wore more haute couture, with Marc Bohan of Christian Dior a favourite. Two of her Bohan evening dresses cannot travel, however, as they are trimmed with ostrich feathers — they might be fit for a princess but they won’t pass modern quarantine rules.
Kelly always said she was frugal with her clothes and rarely threw any out, preferring to re-wear her old favourites. Rainier, on the other hand, liked to go shopping with her and sometimes overruled her thriftiness. She used to say he had excellent taste and instinctively liked the most expensive things, “a delightful quality in a man”.
She had long known she did not want to grow old in Hollywood, which she said was a “town without pity” where only success mattered. She had also seen what life was like for fading stars.
“I get up at seven for the make-up, Rita Hayworth at six, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis at five. I don’t want to know the time when I’ll have to come to the studio even earlier,” she said.
But she had not initially thought that her marriage would burn the bridge to Hollywood. She had thought before she married that perhaps she might make more films but somehow it never happened; she was busy with the children and her royal role, the right script did not come at the right time and somehow the possibility floated away.
But royal life brought its own problems. It sounds like there were times she felt like the princess in the tower. Vanity Fair reported that she had tears in her eyes when telling a friend, producer John Foreman, “I know where I am going to be every single day for the rest of my life.”
She had her own interests, though. She revived the glittering grand balls of Monaco’s past, inviting aristocratic as well as Hollywood royalty. Palace staff knew never to throw out telephone directories; she kept them to press flowers, which she arranged into artwork. She made home movies and often inserted herself as a cameo in a final frame — a homage to her old friend Hitch and to her old life, perhaps.
It almost didn’t happen, that plunge off the cliff on the Cote D’Azur that killed her.
Like her meeting with Rainier, Kelly’s exit from the stage of life was linked to fashion. She had filled the back seat of her car with clothes she was taking to be altered for the coming season.
She didn’t want them crushed, so she brushed aside her normal chauffeur to take the wheel herself, with her younger daughter Stephanie at her side.
Driving along the very road made famous in To Catch a Thief, she is said to have suffered a minor stroke that made her lose control of the car. In September 1982, aged only 52, the queen of style and princess of Monaco was dead.
Girardin’s face crumples even today when she is asked about it. “She was so beautiful,” she says through a translator, briefly covering her face with her hands. “Her eyes were sublime. I miss her very much. Twenty-five years [the period they worked together] is a long time.” Kelly once said she wanted to be remembered as a kind and loving person. In Girardin, she gets her wish.
■The exhibition Grace Kelly: Style Icon will be opened by Princess Charlene of Monaco on March 10 and will run from March 11 to June 17 at the Bendigo Art Gallery.
Karen Kissane travelled to Monte Carlo as a guest of Monaco Tourism. 

First published in The Age’s Life and Style Magazine.

Italians fear being lumped with the Costa Concordia’s skipper.

GIGLIO, ITALY

Even Hollywood at its cheesiest would be wary of cramming such a clutch of omens into one script.
When the cruise liner Costa Concordia was launched in 2006, the champagne bottle failed to break against its side, causing gasps of dismay from onlookers.
When its captain, Francesco Schettino, was interviewed a year ago, he said, “I wouldn’t like to be in the role of the captain of the Titanic.” Last week, its passengers included Valentina Capuano, whose grandmother survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 but whose great-uncle, a waiter on the ship, did not.
When the Costa Concordia hit rocks and foundered last Friday night, it was dinner time and the band was playing the love song from the film Titanic.
Within an hour, disaster movie scenes were playing out in the dark winter waters near the tiny port of the island of Giglio, off the coast of Tuscany in Italy’s north-west.
Francis Servel, a 71-year-old Frenchman, gave his wife his lifejacket because she could not swim. He jumped into the water and cried out to encourage her in. Nicole Servel, 61, managed to get to shore but her husband was swept away and has not been found. “The last thing I heard him say was that I would be fine. Then I never saw him again,” she says. “I am angry because there was no boat for us and there was no one to save my husband. I owe my life to him.”
Another Frenchwoman, Beatrice Micheaud, 58, and her 61-year-old husband, clung to the side of a life-raft for more than an hour. “We … kept lifting our heads to shout to ask to be taken on board but the people in the raft didn’t hear us, or didn’t want to hear us. We were exhausted.”
The long-haired drummer in the ship’s band, Giuseppe Girolamo, is among the 21 still missing (11 are confirmed dead). Girolamo had a place in one of the lifeboats but gave it up to a child.
It is not the stories of courage, selflessness and tenacity that have captured Italy’s imagination, however, but the actions – and inaction – of the man at the helm: Francesco Schettino, apparently a captain of skill but a deeply flawed personality now undone by his own hubris. The over-reaching Icarus flew too close to the sun; the arrogant Schettino, convinced of his superlative navigational ability, sailed too close to the rocks.
For both, the crash back to reality was devastating. Schettino has become a national figure of shame not just for having crashed the ship as part of an ego trip but for allegedly having committed the captain’s mortal sin: abandoning his ship and escaping to safety in a lifeboat while hundreds of passengers were still struggling on board.
A coast guard commander, frustrated when Schettino resisted his orders to return to the ship and oversee evacuation, was recorded roaring at Schettino, “Get on board, for f—‘s sake!” He demanded that Schettino tell him how many women and children needed help. Within hours of that exchange being broadcast, Italians were wearing mocking T-shirts with “Vada a bordo, cazzo!”, and the phrase became Twitter’s top-trending Italian hashtag.
Newspaper commentators were quick to pounce on the damage to the national standing — and the allegory of the shipwreck with Italy’s broader troubles as it comes close to the reef of the euro zone crisis, among other problems.
“We had just come out of the tunnel of bunga bunga,” Caterina Soffici wrote in a blog for the left-leaning Il Fatto Quotidiano. “We were just drawing that little relieved breath that would enable us to toil again up the hill to international credibility. But [now] … we’ve gone straight into the Titanic nightmare [and] Italy is once again the laughing stock of foreign newspapers.”
Writing for Silvio Berlusconi’s paper Il Giornale, Cristiano Gatti cringed at the world taking delight in an image of “the same old rascally Italians: those unreliable cowards who turn and run in war and flee like rabbits from the ship, even if they are in command”.
But Gatti and others pointed out that the story did have heroes. Schettino might have been in a lifeboat with his first and second officers at the height of the crisis but an off-duty ship’s captain stayed and managed the evacuation, along with Schettino’s junior officers.
But the man who has come to stand for everything Schettino failed to be that night is actually the coastguard commander, Gregorio de Falco, whose enraged demands that Schettino live up to his responsibilities have become legend.
Schettino, in his early 50s, is a handsome man with a small pot belly, a deep tan, dark hair and blue eyes with lashes that curl.
He comes from a family of several generations of seafarers and began his career on ferry boats before becoming a captain in 2006. He was a controlling, perhaps even narcissistic commander, seen to have had a stellar rise in the cruise industry.
One of the officers on board the Costa Concordia, Martino Pellegrino, told La Repubblica newspaper: “If I had to make a comparison, we got the impression that he would drive a bus like a Ferrari.” Pellegrino also said Schettino was an “authoritarian” who was often “inflexible”.
One of his former commanders, Mario Palombo, told reporters: “I’ve always had my reservations about Schettino. It’s true, he was my second-in-command, but he was too exuberant. A daredevil. More than once I had to put him in his place.”
On the night of the shipwreck, Schettino told an investigating magistrate this week, he took the liner near Giglio’s rocky coast because he wanted to give a “salute” to Palombo, who lived on the island. Cocky, he navigated without using charts.
“It’s true that the salute was for Commodore Mario Palombo, with whom I was on the telephone … I made a mistake in the approach.
“I was navigating by sight because I knew the depths well and I had done this manoeuvre three or four times. But this time I ordered the turn too late and I ended up in water that was too shallow,” he said.
About 9.30pm, the ship hit a rocky outlet called Le Scole, which tore open a gash in the port side of the hull. Schettino said: “I don’t know why it happened. I was a victim of my instincts.”
Actually, the 11 dead and 21 missing were the real victims of his instincts. And his instincts, once the ship struck rocks with a shuddering groan, remained poor.
His initial reaction seems to have been denial. The coastguard, alerted by a passenger’s mobile phone call, contacted him twice to ask if the ship was all right. Twice, he denied there was a serious problem.
On the decks below, there was panic. Cabins were plunged into darkness. Drinks slid off tables, plates smashed. An English crew member, Rose Metcalf, said: “It was just terrifying … people were white, people were crying, screaming.” Video footage shows children shrieking “mummy!” and “daddy!”
But Schettino announced an electrical fault and said it was not serious. James Thomas, who had been working as an entertainer on the ship, said the staff then heard two short blasts followed by alternate tones, “which means there is a leak on board and so the crew were divided, very much so. A lot of people said, ‘No, just tell everyone to stay calm, that’s what we’ve been told to say.’ But then other people took the initiative and said, ‘OK, let’s tell everyone to stay calm but hand over lifejackets.”‘
It was only at 10.30pm that a reluctant Schettino, under pressure from the coastguard, finally sent a mayday. The vessel was then listing 20 degrees.
It was another 20 minutes before he gave the order to abandon ship, but it seems that some of his junior officers defied his inaction and began lowering boats before he made the decision. The only passengers who recognised the abandon-ship signal — seven blasts of the horn — were those who had sailed on earlier cruises, as this shipload had not had its emergency drill.
Passengers said there was almost no help from crew with the evacuation. Metcalf recalled: “We were literally throwing each other. We were creating human chains to try and pass people over gaps that, if they dropped down, there was no recovery from. What was vertical was becoming horizontal.”
Discipline broke down among the crew and many passengers reported that it was waiters, chefs and entertainers who helped with the evacuation. Englishwoman Sandra Rogers, 62, later told the Daily Mail: “There was no ‘women and children first’ policy. There were big men, crew members, pushing past us to get into the lifeboats. It was disgusting.”
She said the men had knocked her and her two seven-year-old granddaughters. “And when we finally got into a lifeboat, people, grown men, were trying to jump into the boat. I thought, ‘If they land in here, we are going to capsize.”‘
The captain was in a lifeboat himself by 11.40pm, although the last passengers were not evacuated until 3am. He claims this was an accident.
During questioning this week, Schettino is reported to have said: “The passengers were pouring on to the decks, taking the lifeboats by assault. I didn’t even have a lifejacket because I had given it to one of the passengers. I was trying to get people to get into the boats in an orderly fashion. Suddenly, since the ship was at a 60 to 70 degree angle, I tripped and I ended up in one of the boats.”
The judge questioning him, Valeria Montesarchio, said Schettino had not made “any serious attempt” to return to the vessel or “even close to it”.
This was despite the furious bollocking he received from the coast-guard commander, Gregorio de Falco, who was appalled when Schettino told him he was in a lifeboat while hundreds of people were still aboard. De Falco ordered him back to the bridge, saying, “Captain. This is an order. Now I am in command. You have declared the abandoning of a ship and are going to co-ordinate the rescue from the bridge. What do you want to do? Go home?”
When Schettino protested that the ship was tilted, de Falco said: “There are people who are coming down the ladder on the bow. Go back in the opposite direction, get back on the ship, and tell me how many people there are and what they have on board. Clear? Tell me if there are children, women and what kind of help they need. And you tell me the number of each of these categories. Is that clear?
“Look, Schettino, perhaps you have saved yourself from the sea but I will make you look very bad. I will make you pay for this. Dammit!”
But his lawyer claimed Schettino “saved thousands” with his final manoeuvre, bringing the ship closer to shore to make evacuation easier, and that getting back on board was impossible. “You try and see if you could get back on a vessel in that condition,” Bruno Leporatti said.
“You need a helicopter.”
It was Roberto Bosio, the off-duty captain from a sister ship travelling on the liner as a passenger, who stayed behind to man the bridge after it was abandoned. Two other Italian officers also stayed to try to bring order to the chaos.
Afterwards, Bosio was scathing about Schettino: “Only a disgraceful man would have left all those passengers on board. It was the most horrible experience of my life, a tragedy, a heartache that I will carry with me forever … don’t call me a hero. I and the others with me just did our duty. We looked each other in the eyes for a second and then we just got on with it.”
The next day, Schettino left the harbour master’s office at 11.30am. He took a taxi a short distance to a Giglio hotel. Driver Ottavio Brizzi told reporters: “He didn’t say very much apart from asking me where he could buy some dry socks. He looked very cold and scared — he looked like a beaten dog.”
Schettino has been savaged since. He has been released from jail but is under house arrest and faces two police inquiries: one into his changing the route and one into the evacuation of the ship. He could receive up to 12 years in jail if convicted of manslaughter and abandoning his ship before his passengers did.
La Stampa newspaper said in an editorial Italy had had only two months to restore its international reputation since technocrat Mario Monti replaced the buffoonery of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi: “Two months to forget the worst of ourselves: the superficiality, the carelessness, the pomposity, the abdication of responsibility.
“And then, with a single nudge of the rudder, Captain Schettino has sunk our international reputation, along with his ship.
“… We are looking at a type of Italian that we cannot pretend not to recognise: more full of himself than sure of himself. One who does stupid things for the sake of having fun and seeks to hide them with the mantra, ‘everything’s OK, no problem’.”
Schettino’s wife and family have spoken out in his defence, and they were joined by members of his local town, including his priest, Don Gennaro Starita, who told parishioners he was “really angry” about the way Schettino had been portrayed.
“He has been pilloried by the media,” he said. “Humanly speaking, they have killed him. It’s a shame. There are so many dead already, why do we want another?”
The debate is now moving to how to deal with the vast wreckage of what is tipped to be the most expensive insured disaster in maritime history.
Schettino is likely to find himself wrong on yet one more point. In the newspaper interview he gave last year, he was asked about what impact the sinking of the Titanic had on people’s perceptions of ship safety at the time. He said: “Luckily, people quickly forget tragedies.”

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

FUTURE LONDON – Life has imitated art. The postcode for the new area is E20, the same one scriptwriters created for the TV soap EastEnders.’

ON A sunny Saturday afternoon in an east London high street, a voice wafts over the shoppers’ bustle. A pleasant cockney tenor is singing, at the top of his lungs, “It won’t be a stylish marriage, we can’t afford a carriage . . .”
The serenade is coming from a young man on a bicycle. He is dressed in a grey suit with a red carnation in his buttonhole, and his legs are pedalling furiously. In front of him, in a brown box on wheels propelled by his bike, sits his Daisy. She is fully frocked: white bustier wedding dress, bouquet, wisps of baby’s breath in her hair. She holds her hand to her face, blushing and laughing, torn between embarrassment and delight.
The moment is an ode to cockney joy — albeit in gentrifying Islington, where the middle-class has encroached upon an old working-class suburb. Even so, the flashing vignette captures what are seen as the traditional strengths of the inhabitants of the East End, London’s struggle-town: resilience, inventiveness and good-humoured cheek in the face of hardship.
That airbrushed view of the East End — the good hearts and grittiness of the battlers in the 1967 film To Sir with Love, or the strong group loyalties in the long-running soap EastEnders — represents the subculture of a predominantly white cockney enclave existing now only in pockets. Today the people of the East End are among Britain’s most diverse, with 70 per cent of its residents coming from non-English backgrounds. Traces of the cockney sing-song are mostly merged with lilting Caribbean rhythms or clipped Bengali vowels — or, more recently, the accents of migrants from the Horn of Africa. But while different groups have come and gone, over hundreds of years one thing about the East End has never changed: it has always been a sinkhole of poverty.
Many times philanthropists and governments have tried to tackle its disadvantage but it has proved stubbornly hard to “fix”, lagging behind even when the rest of the city was booming. Around Britain, at least 21 per cent of children live in poverty. “The highest classification of over 40 per cent exists in a swath across the East End,” says Donald Hirsch, head of income studies at the centre for research in social policy at Loughborough University. “It’s not just a pocket. It’s whole boroughs [municipalities] with four out of 10 children in families where there are either no jobs or very low incomes. It’s the biggest concentration of poverty in the country, which is interesting because it’s in such a rich city.”
In some East End suburbs, the rate is more than 70 per cent. Children in the East End have a smaller chance of reaching university. Health is poorer, and death, on average, comes sooner than for other Londoners. The physical fabric is run down. Buildings are scarred by traffic fumes and marred by peeling woodwork; open doorways often reveal tired paint and shabby carpet. Grim council towers rear, the legacy of slum clearance and the need to rebuild after the Blitz. There is little open space for play; one of the few small parks is dedicated to Altab Ali, who was murdered there in 1978 in a racially motivated attack.
As Britain’s economy has flattened and tens of thousands of jobs have disappeared, many in the East End believe the fight has been lost before they have even entered the ring. “Youth employment opportunities have absolutely shrivelled over the last few years,” says Professor Anne Power of the London School of Economics, who conducted a 10-year study of East End families. “Young people see the people around them losing jobs, they hear the job market is competitive and if they’re not doing well at school, they lose hope.”
Now East Enders are being offered a sliver of light. London won the bid for the 2012 Olympics based on three promises: that this would be the greenest Olympics; that the Games would spearhead efforts to encourage Britons to exercise more; and that Olympic construction would focus on urban regeneration.
The result has been an accelerated transformation of the most dismal and polluted East End suburb, Stratford. The site chosen for the Olympic Park was home to great mounds of rubble from the Blitz, contaminated soil and dumped garbage. Stratford had few transport links and was almost isolated from the rest of London, says Dan Hawthorn, head of the London 2012 team for the Greater London Authority. “It was virtually cut off from the rest of the city.” Now it is getting new train lines, an Olympic Park and athlete’s village, and the largest shopping mall in western Europe (16 hectares on a 72-hectare development, at a cost of £1.5 billion ($A2.3 billion). Australian company Westfield is behind the gleaming glass-and-granite shopping mall and hotel complex, known as Stratford City, which opened in September.
Life has imitated art. The postcode for the new area is E20, the same one scriptwriters created for TV soap EastEnders.
The Olympic Park is not yet finished, with workmen and jackhammers still vying with the newly established grass and wildflowers, but it will be stunning. Award-winning architecture is set in vast, graceful gardens planted with 4000 trees and criss-crossed by newly revived rivers and streams. “It’s very English,” says Julian Sutherland, director for sustainable development at Atkins, the engineering firm for the Games. “The park here is like other parks in London, a very relaxed, landscape feel. We wanted to create the atmosphere of a summer festival.”
It is as foreign to the concrete and cramming of the old East End as a spaceship from Mars. It is hoped the attractions that will stay when the Games are over — the velodrome, the BMX track, the aquatic centre and the ball games centre — will pull people into the area, along with the twisty red tower of the ArcelorMittal Orbit, built purely as a quirky landmark that tourists will be able to climb. West Ham football team is one of the bidders to be a tenant of the stadium.
An Olympics-legacy company has been set up to oversee the conversion of the park into the core of a new community. The village for 15,000 athletes will be converted to private housing, and the huge media centre for 30,000 Games journalists and broadcasters will become retail and office space. The gardens, and the canals that have been dug out from under tonnes of foul landfill, will offer places to walk, cycle, play, fish and canoe.
“The Games will be just 72 days in a 40-year reconstruction of East London,” Sutherland says.
London has learnt from the refurbishment of the former docks area of Canary Wharf, where office towers and grand apartments did little to benefit the poor already living there. As part of the Stratford development, Westfield agreed to provide social benefits. Construction teams hired local unemployed and offered apprenticeships. In the shopping centre, 2000 out of 10,000 jobs were earmarked for local unemployed, and 35 per cent of 5000 homes built into the master plan must be affordable, says John Burton, director of Westfield Stratford City.
“The value of community benefit is £200 million across the whole of the master plan, not just Westfield,” Burton says. This includes an “academy” based in the shopping centre where people without skills are trained in retail, hospitality, security or other roles that would make them attractive to employers. “We train people who have never been in a job to make them fit for an interview,” Burton says. “It’s about trying to break the vicious cycle. In some families there are three or four generations on welfare.”
It is hoped the developments will bring new work, new homes and new wealth. If the plan succeeds, it could be a model for urban renewal in future Olympic cities. If it doesn’t, Stratford’s arenas will join the white elephants of Olympics past in cities such as Barcelona, where a diving pool is overgrown with shrubs, or Athens, where pigs snuffle through the 20,000-seat weightlifting stadium.
“There’s a history of Olympic villages having a hard time turning into anything else,” says Doug Saunders, a journalist and author of the book Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World, which has a chapter on the East End.
For those East Enders who have won a job after struggling for years on the dole, life has been transformed. Burton says he was staying in one of the development’s hotels where a young woman served him. He learned that she was a 27-year-old single mother and this was the first job she had ever held: “She said the proudest day of her life was when she [went to the dole office] to sign off and say: ‘I no longer need benefits.’ ”
For Hugh Preedy, 53, it has meant his first job in nearly two years. He sent off more than 300 applications in that time and won only eight interviews, despite having had a solid 17 years in the wine trade, and 10 years before that in toys and games. Now he works at Stratford City selling glass and china in the John Lewis department store (Britain’s equivalent of Myer). “I think the whole thing is incredibly positive,” he says. “I have lived all over London, and the East End has suffered from a catastrophic lack of investment for 30 or 40 years. Some people who have been here for a long time [think:] ‘Nobody loves us, they don’t care.’ ”
For every Preedy, there are many more who missed out. John Lewis at Stratford advertised 800 jobs and received 13,000 applications. The store normally has a 15 per cent dropout rate with new recruits; here, the rate has been zero. East Enders are desperate for work.
The mayor of Newham, the borough in which Stratford sits, is delighted by the twin developments of Olympic Park and Westfield but has no illusions about the oceanic need. Sir Robin Wales says there are six boroughs in the East End, and his own has to find jobs for 20,000 people just in order to lift itself to the same jobless rate as the rest of the country. “Eighteen thousand people here have never, ever worked, out of a population of 300,000,” he says. “Give me six Westfields and I will change East London.”
But even those East Enders who don’t win a job from the immediate transformation will be able to enjoy outdoor space in a way that has never before been possible. Professor Power’s study found East End families were worried mostly about money, but that second to that was the lack of activities for their children.
“Because of the shortage of money, [some families’] kids would take it in turn to go to the school football club,” she says. “They are living in a rich city, so everything is very expensive, which means they can’t access a lot of things.”
Parents’ fear of the streets — that their children would be attacked or pressured to join gangs — made them reluctant to let children outside, she says. “But it’s physically impossible to keep teenagers locked in a small flat. That’s why you get gangs in the street. They are just groups of young people with nowhere to go and nothing to do — with an adult population that’s afraid of them.”
So the open spaces of the new park are welcome, says Power, as is the possibility that locals might be trained for jobs maintaining the gardens and facilities.
She is concerned, however, about how the changes have already had “a knock-on effect” in terms of rising East End property prices. She said a small house in Hackney was recently offered for £600,000: “There’s no typical family that would come within miles and miles of that.” Prices were already going up for other reasons, including the demolition of council housing towers: “The councils are displacing large numbers of poor people, so in that sense, too, the East End will be transformed.”
It is the eternal dilemma of urban regeneration: make a rundown area more desirable and suddenly the poor can no longer afford it. But Power reserves her most scathing comments for the shopping mall. “I absolutely hate that kind of development,” she says. “They destroy dozens and dozens of small, ‘get-by’ businesses that everybody used. Each time you get a mega-development like that in a poor area you destroy so much.”
Power can see the big picture because she knows of the studies that lie behind this prognosis. For Preedy and other locals who have clambered aboard the new lifeboat, there is only the glow of the present — and the fear it might not last.
“The greatest local concern is what will be the post-Olympic legacy?” he says. “What will happen when the crowds and the spotlight of the world turn away and go somewhere else?”
But experts say the transport links that have been created to move hundreds of thousands of spectators to and from the Olympic Park will forever change the East End for the better. It now has 10 railway lines including an international one. “Stratford is now one of the best connected places in London, including a [rail] connection to Europe,” says the Greater London Authority’s Dan Hawthorn.
“That will bring benefits for decades to come,” says Paul Johnson, an economic historian who specialised in the East End before becoming vice-chancellor of Melbourne’s La Trobe University. He says the benefits will be localised to Stratford at first but will begin to seep through the other boroughs. The new area “will bring people in, there will be major sporting events, concerts, exhibitions. It will begin to change Londoners’ minds about the East End.”
Hawthorn hopes it will also change the mindset of East Enders themselves. “We want to bring the quality of life up to the London average, so that the East End can imagine itself as having as much chance to succeed as the rest of London.”

First published in The Age.