Snaps from Stratford on Friday as one of the seven bridges was lifted into place on the Olympic Site. You can also check out this short and vaguely interesting video fly-through from the ODA showing overall progress on the Olympic site. The cupcake is taking shape! All images by Andy Wilkes......

As our "summer of cycling" draws to a close with our Paralympians raking in the hardware (that's gold in 4 cycling events so far) in Beijing's VeloPark, Chris Hoy's relentless round of public appearances rolls on back home with him helping to unveil the designs for our 2012 Velodrome as they are finally put forward for planning permission. And here's a nifty animation to fly you through the plans. The BMXers are particularly cute,......

It's 3 years ago on Sunday that London found out we'd be hosting the 2012 Olympic Games. The fate of Forman's Salmon Smoking factory was thereby sealed as it was the exact spot that the new Olympic Stadium would be built. Forman's are now in a new factory overlooking the site and to mark this anniversary, they've installed a live webcam on the roof of their new gaff to spy on Stadium building and......

If you need to give your Glastonbury wellies a trial run before the inevitable mudslide next week then get yourself along to the the Manor Gardening Society allotments from 1pm today. You remember these plucky allotmenteers. They fought a brave fight against eviction from their original Manor Gardens plot - part of the Olympic site - but are now adjusting to life in their temporary plots in Marsh Lane Fields, Leyton, E10. Today's open......

Finally! A good news story about the 2012 Olympics. IOC Coordination Commission Chairman Denis Oswald was not only "truly impressed" with London's progress since the IOC's last visit but singled out progress on the Olympic parks as "truly astounding". Construction work on the sunken cupcake has commenced 3 months ahead of schedule. Asked to rate London's performance so far Mr Oswald generously marked us 9.75 out of 10 with only some concerns about transport......

Waterfront London, which opened today, looks at waterside development in London; recently completed, underway or in the pipeline. It considers how our waterfronts are transforming and being embraced as essential public spaces whereas, not long ago, we buried rivers, turned them into sewers or filled in and built on them. The enlightened approach, celebrated here, is to embrace the waterways and exploit their potential as transport routes, leisure facilities and biodiverse environments. The key......

The Olympic Park has received a lot of attention lately, unveiling its flagship stadium, promising to start work on it early and suffering fiery blazes which fortuitously destroyed a warehouse due for demolition. This Saturday though, an audaciously different kind of attention will be focused on the Stratford site: imagining the Olympics weren't happening. WE SELL BOXES WE BUY GOLD is an artistic collaboration exploring what the Olympic site means to people and endeavouring......

With immaculate PR timing, just a week after London was urged to focus on delivering the 2012 Games on time, the team at Olympic HQ announce that work is starting on the Stratford Olympic Stadium 3 months ahead of schedule. In fact, they're so ahead of their game the news hasn't yet made it into the official 2012 website, although, that tells us other thrilling news: the laying of underground power cables is also......

Phosphatic rock. A radium-luminised gauge dial face. Radium paint. It sounds like an amateur nuclear hobbyist's shopping list, but these are just some of the scary-sounding radioactive materials found recently at the Olympic Park site in east London. Contractors uncovered the objects whilst clearing a 100-year old waste tip near Stratford last month. A subsequent survey, ordered by the Olympic Delivery Authority, revealed "low level" contamination and hotspots of the highly poisonous heavy metal......

Mayor 'wobbles' over West London tram. Man burns down his wife's house...twice. No rats smelled in connection with the other double fire in the news. A two-tier parking scheme is introduced. The peerless Diamond Geezer, as usual, spots what the rest of us missed. The Olympic Park is now closed off for five years of development. He describes several walks around the derelict land that are now impossible. Image courtesy of [windscreen fly] via......

Today the spotlight is firmly on Tony Blair. As he heads off into the political sunset, he may consider the high point of his premiership to be the securing of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games for London - and the low point to be the war in Iraq. So it's fitting that the Olympic Park right this moment looks like a bomb-site. But this is not ordinary rubble, oh no - it is......

Now that Cedric’s had a chance to recover from the awfully big excitement of the Clissold Park windfall, our regeneration rabbit is about to go hippety hoppety flop eared over news that Silvertown Quays has had the go ahead from Newham. This means that there will be a massive, mixed use development at the Royal Victoria Dock in the East End, full of shiny new houses, offices, workspaces, green spaces and all those positive......

With this column, we try to bring you a new blog every week. We scour the cybervestry for new species of weblog, like a Victorian naturalist in the forests of Borneo. This week, we've stumbled upon a cracking little site hiding in the undergrowth. London Skyline eschews any nod towards a clever name in favour of doing what it says on the tin - writing about the London skyline. And the author asks a......

So first we say we can put on a better Olympics than Paris and much to our surprise we were taken seriously. Much backtracking later and a LOT of scaling down of the very same plans that won us the bid, we realise that we can't afford it. And now the new security director of the 2012 London Olympics reckons that al-Qaida will want in on the games too: The al-Qaida terrorist group is......

We knew the future Olympic Park was contaminated with radioactive material, but we had no idea an actual nuclear strike had taken place. These hazy outlines are the possible remains of two Stratford locals, caught on the church steps during the blast. Or maybe it's just a graffiti artist.......

There've been a few changes to the plans for the Olympic Park, in order to save on so many jobs and premises being relocated. Wembley now has a 70% chance of being completed in time for the FA Cup. The Heathrow Terminal 5 workers will start a 3 day strike today. Kate Moss has decided to come home, she'll be back at end of this week to make a 'full and frank' confession apparently (meanwhile,......

On our way home on Friday, we did a silly thing. We bought the Evening Standard. As usual, we flicked through the 'ES' magazine and marvelled at how a publication that was once semi-decent, has been transfomed into a brochure for gormless vampire-like socialites and puff pieces on photogenic actresses/models/whatevers. Then we had a gander at the paper itself, looking for how many headlines including the word 'chaos' we could find. During this joy-free......

With just a week before London has to submit its offical bid for the 2012 Olympic games, Seb Coe and his team have unveiled their plans for the 500-acre Olympic Park. The main stadium, to be located in the Lea Valley, is designed to "communicate physical strength, sport and movement" with a roof which wraps itself around the venue in the same way "that muscles support and represent the human body". Also included in the......