Olympic Games wipe grime from London's image

They have come in their thousands. Congregating in Hackney's Victoria Park, watching the Olympic events on the huge screen erected there by the borough's council. The atmosphere is one of festivity and celebration: music plays, children enjoy fairground rides while their parents relax and take in the atmosphere.

This is a scene being replayed across London over the course of the Games. This is the London that the Games chairman, Sebastian Coe, and his fellow organisers hope to showcase to the world. It is a world away from the horror and violence that propelled Hackney and neighbouring boroughs onto the world stage exactly one year ago.

This time last year London was ablaze. On August 6, 2011, the police shooting of a 29-year-old man in Tottenham sparked riots that began locally and tore through the city and on across the country. Copycat criminals took to the streets in night after night of disturbances, peaking on August 8.

Speaking yesterday, Lord Coe said: "I'm glad the world is now seeing the London I recognise.

"We have seen it in the way that we have welcomed the world into our neighbourhoods. When they have got there and arrived in London and they have started their journey from the airport through to the competitive venue, I think they have been helped and they have been charmed."

Reflecting on the events of last year, he said: "It was a nightmare. It wasn't a London I recognised. London was changed beyond recognition."

As a young man Lord Coe was a member of Haringey Athletic Club - which, by a quirk of fate is located, he noted: "right at the genesis of those riots".

For many, the spectre of last year's riots has hung over the Olympics. In the days leading up to the anniversary there were concerns that trouble would flare once more. Certainly none who witnessed the violence firsthand will ever forget, or perhaps quite believe, the scenes on the streets of the capital just 12 months ago.

Protests, which started with a couple of hundred people on Tottenham High Street, gave way to organised, extensive rioting and looting.

Inspector Andre Ramsay was in charge of 21 police officers who found themselves struggling to hold the line on the first night of riots in Tottenham. "I have never experienced anything so coordinated, so organised and so concentrated in terms of missiles being thrown," he recalled.

"The rioters were gesturing that they were carrying knives. I saw individuals carrying what I believed to be machetes at the side of their leg."

Inspector Ramsay was knocked unconscious and is quite certain that his helmet saved his life that night as petrol bombs, debris and anything else the rioters could grab rained down upon him and his men.

The riots spread into Hackney, Croydon, Peckham, Lewisham, Clapham, Ealing and Brixton. Police helicopters hovered overhead; armoured vans lined the streets; vehicles and shops were torched and tube stations were closed. The prime minister cut short his holiday in Tuscany as 1,700 extra police officers were put on the streets.

As of July 30, there have been 4521 arrests in connection with the riots. More than 3,000 have been prosecuted and convicted of crimes ranging from theft to violent disorder. Many of those involved were minors.

It is hard to believe that the anger and mindless violence of those August days and nights last year took place in the same city as the Games today.

Then the face of London was one of masked youths full of bold statements, claiming the streets as their own, and taking whatever they pleased.

Today the face of London 2012 is the smiling welcome offered by 70,000 Olympic volunteers.

The NBC journalist Savannah Guthrie, in London to cover the Games, said: "It's an amazing turnaround. I can't imagine that people won't come away from the Games without a positive image of London."

The enthusiasm of the crowds has been much commented on by visiting spectators and Olympians alike. The US swimmer Ryan Lochte described the British crowds as "just incredible", and unlike any Games he had experienced. He said: "The crowd noise is just fuelling everybody."

In an interview on Radio 4's Today programme, London's Mayor Boris Johnson said that the riots had revealed "deep social problems", but they were problems that, he felt, the Olympics and sport could play a part in addressing.

Yesterday Lord Coe issued a "massive, massive thank you," to the people of Britain for getting so wholeheartedly behind the Games.

He said: "Would I say I'm surprised? Probably not. But do I think it's probably one of the most extraordinary things in my lifetime I've seen? Then the answer is, 'Yes.'"

lcollins@thenational.ae