Posts

Showing posts matching the search for International Quarter London

Did Stratford Need The Olympics?

Image
Lee Valley VeloPark Standing on the tenth floor of TfL's soon-to-be offices in the heart of the Olympic Park, there's a panoramic view of Stratford and the rest of London beyond. The landscape is littered with cranes and unfinished tower blocks like the one we're standing in. Among them there's a sprinkling of former Olympic venues that provided the catalyst for this re-imagined Stratford to occur. Or did they? A huge slice of the changes in the Olympic Park comes from International Quarter London . IQL is run by property development company Lendlease , and totals up to 4 million sq ft of offices. Lendlease also built the luxury apartment complex Glasshouse Gardens in the Olympic Park and, originally built the Athletes' Village for the games. The team here knows intimately the rapid changes the area has undergone. Kevin Chapman, head of offices at IQL, tells us, "what we've had to do is bring the commercial office element into the Olympic Park as part...

Why Was an Italian Graduate Student Tortured and Murdered in Egypt?

Image
Regeni was undeterred. Proficient in five languages, he was insatiably curious and exuded a low-intensity charm that attracted a wide circle of friends. From 12 to 14, he served as youth mayor of his hometown, Fiumicello. He prided himself on his ability to navigate different cultures, and he relished Cairo ’s unruly street life : the smoky cafes, the endless hustle, the candy- colored party boats that plied the Nile at night. He registered as a visiting scholar at American University in Cairo and found a room in Dokki, a traffic-choked neighborhood between the Pyramids and the Nile, where he shared an apartment with two young professionals : Juliane Schoki, who taught German, and Mohamed El Sayad , a lawyer at one of Cairo’s oldest law firms . Dokki was an unfashionable address, but it was just two subway stops from downtown Cairo with its maze of cheap hotels, dive bars and crumbling apartment blocks encircling Tahrir Square . Regeni soon befriended writers and artists and practi...