An Olympic effort to pretend this is not grubby Stratford

TONIGHT’S the night, people.

There will be two billion of us worldwide watching the Olympic opening ceremony, as it is brought to you from a formerly horrid patch of east London where nobody ever went unless to buy drugs (even then, only if there were none available anywhere else).

Stratford is proof that if you leave a vast post-industrial wasteland to rot in poverty for long enough, someone will build an Olympic site on it. It is surreal, the transformation. Where there were kebab shops, now there is Prada.