Building an Olympic dream

By Gordon Farquhar BBC 5 Live sports news correspondent

2008 will be a significant year for the organisers of the London Olympics.

The site will feature a brand-new 80,000 seater stadium

Finally, two-and-a-half years after winning the right to stage the 2012 Games, the first venues will start to emerge from the wasteland of spoil heaps that are identifiable at the Olympic Park site in Stratford.

Surveying the site in early January, it requires quite a leap of imagination to picture the finished article.

It's the dark days of the Blitz rather than the dazzling pyrotechnic spectacle of an opening ceremony that come to mind on this bleak landscape.

Joking aside, the impact of the Second World War German bombing raids is tangible.

There are areas where the subsoil is highly unstable as a result, and turning up munitions like an unexploded hand grenade is not unusual.

Aside from dealing with the military hardware, the main challenge is of decontamination.

First stop on a specially-arranged bus tour was the old West Ham landfill site, an area so polluted vehicles must have their undersides and wheels washed on the way out.

The site currently has 2,000 people working on it, but such is the vast size of the project, you would never know - the humans are mostly lost among the monster trucks.

Just in case, the huge waste grading and cleaning machine has a built-in radioactivity sensor, and cuts out if any is found.

Elsewhere soil cleaning machines are hard at work decontaminating the soil which lies in mounds all over the site.

All around there are diggers, bulldozers and earthmovers shifting and sorting the dirt, more than a million tonnes of it. Polluted water is collected, then siphoned into tankers and taken away for disposal.

Precious little else leaves the site, however, 95% of the materials they've recovered from the nine-month long demolition phase are being recycled on site.

Concrete is crushed to form hardcore for the roadways and its reinforcing rods are removed and recycled. Steel is unbolted and used again where suitable.

Wood is chipped and composted locally; trees are logged and set aside for wildlife habits, bricks stacked up for re-laying.

The constructors say this is unprecedented and they've never gone to these lengths before to recycle.

The green initiatives are however partly driven by business pragmatism - new EU directives say dumping such waste carries a penalty of £200 per tonne.

Pretty much the only buildings now standing on the square-mile suite are home to the contractors' hi-tech monitoring and testing labs, kitted out at a cost of £2m, to make sure the site is clean enough for construction.

With it now effectively cleared, it's possible to appreciate the impact of the canals and waterways that flow through the area.

In Games mode, there will be 30 bridges in place to help bring athletes, spectators and the media to venues. Fifteen of them will stay, another example say the organisers, of the regeneration benefits of the Games.

There is plenty of work still to do at the Olmpic Park site

Over 50 electricity pylons are still criss-crossing the site, but with works all but complete on the tunnels, the 100km of cabling can soon be run underground.

The site currently has 2,000 people working on it, but such is the vast size of the project, you would never know - the humans are mostly lost among the monster trucks.

There are signs everywhere urging them to beware, and avoid the many hazards once they've got past the strict security measures. The signs outside might extol this as being "Everyone's London 2012," but such magnanimity doesn't extend to unscheduled visits after hours.

What I'm left with is the vast sense of scale of a project like this, the huge amount of work required just to get the site ready for building, and the similar quantity of the work left to do.

The London Organising Committee (LOCOG) aspire to be running test events at the venues by the middle of 2011.

That might look a bit ambitious at the moment, but so was the whole bid in the first place, and then look what happened.