Would you Adam and Eve it... welcome to the new East End

It's like a guarded camp." The words were those of an elderly local man passing the Lower Lea Valley site of the 2012 Olympic Games, where tasters for the completed vision are beginning to emerge. His timing was perfect.

At that moment a coachload of Holocaust survivors supported by sticks and Zimmer frames descended on the site. Their tour guide immediately launches into anecdotes about Mayor Boris, of the chequered history of a scheme many believe is heading for disaster.

Yet there are reasons to be cheerful. For one, the entire endeavour looks to be on schedule. Secondly, the buildings beginning to take shape have the thoroughly modern look of the 21st century - the vision we anticipated in the slate-grey past, when the future was trailed as a utopia in which technology and architecture merge as white domes and remote-controlled homes.

There is a touch of Space Odyssey and Sleeper about the whole development. What is emerging at the Olympic Park - the central Dome, the Velodrome - is pitch perfect for the society in which the iPad is to the fore and the "smart" home in the offing.

It's timely that the East End should be warming to this burgeoning piece of futurism at a time when the nation's first "wired" community is being constructed on the other side of the river at Ebbsfleet Valley, where south-east London morphs into Kent.

There, the first new town of the 21st century is forming in a redundant valley as a suburb to Bluewater, one of the biggest shopping malls in Europe. The Olympic Park will have Stratford City shopping mall, a £1.5 billion venture with an anticipated 300 outlets.

Its skeletal frame has been assembled and attempts to raise itself like something Jurassic stumbling onto its hind legs. But, presently, from every vantage point, it's the central Olympic Stadium that dominates: a Dutch cap of a building, the white that Dulux promises. One thing that we will never see, however, is the 120ft wind turbine that was to proclaim the Olympics green credentials. Apparently, no one's willing to bank on the site being windy enough.

In the past six months, tour guides both official and unofficial have lead visitors around the borders of the fenced enclosure of the park. Teams of pensioners from Essex are regulars, many of them former East Enders who migrated to areas such as Chelmsford, with little interest in returning to their native London postcode, until now.

"I moved out to Harlow years ago," one pensioner making the pilgrimage informs me. "I used to come here when I was a boy and play on the bomb sites over there." He points to the spot where the saddle-like roof of Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre (aka The Pringle) is in place.

Like the demographic of the East End itself, at nearby Stratford, Bow and beyond, this landscape has undergone an overhaul, too. The allotments at Marshland Junction have gone, along with the chalk dust and goal posts on Hackney Marshes.

The first signs of change came with the creation of the Docklands Light Railway. Its Pudding Mill Lane outpost delivers you to the mouth of the Olympic Park, where a hard-hatted employee stands guard over the project.

"Apparently 80 per cent of the people employed here are foreign workers," the Harlow pensioner confides, sotto voce. "So much for British jobs for British workers."

The path bordering the site, the Greenway, has been tidied up at this point, providing the clearing from which to witness the changes taking place. It leads on to the canal bank and towards the A12. Together these form the circumference of the Olympic Park, and a route now favoured by cyclists.

A number of local residents appear pleased with the improvements to the Greenway even though many suspend judgment on the scheme in general. "This didn't have a very good reputation. There was a lot of anti-social behaviour around here. There was prostitution.

The canal was a dumping ground for shopping trolleys, cars and the occasional body." This was the opinion of a resident from a Stratford tower block, cradling a coffee at the View Tube - a DayGlo container housing a cafe and classrooms, and currently the official communal point from which to witness the continuing evolution of the entire development.

According to View Tube manager Rosie Murdoch, there are plans to show films about the local area to encourage present day East Enders to take an interest in the history of the territory, as concrete covers over the past.

Some consumer durables from previous periods have already been excavated and transformed into art. These are exhibited al fresco. Shoes, handbags, food cans and fag packets have been filled with soil and weeds as recycled artworks. In this setting, in this age, it is as hackneyed as the graffiti that coats the walkways of the canal.

Along its banks and in the shadow of the Olympic site sits another relic from the past: the house where Channel 4's The Big Breakfast was filmed. The weatherbeaten props on its lawn, the redundant bathing pool to the rear, are reminders of zoo TV summers from the 1990s, when Paula Yates was alive and Gaby Roslin was a face.

Not that the wind of change has failed to reach this setting. A spanking new building, charcoal and pink, in the shape of a halved salmon is the highlight on the Fish Island side of the canal bank. Forman's & Sons - famous for its "London cure" smoked salmon - was established in 1906 by the great-great grandfather of the current company head, Lance Forman. Always an East End establishment, Forman's moved from Hackney to where the new stadium is now, the year before London won the bid. It was forced to move once more.

The new factory has a restaurant, and an art gallery that takes up the top floor. Lance Forman has recently bought the neighbouring warehouse: "I'd like to see this become like Camden Lock. Be good to have a buzz here with boutiquey restaurants, as an antidote to the high street aspect that you'll get from Stratford City."

The view from Forman's offers another angle on the site. From here it's possible to see how other buildings are taking shape - the huge media centre, Eton Manor where the Paralympic Games will be staged, the athletes village.

Forman's is one of the few companies out of around 250 once in the area that has relocated nearby.

There were attempts to document the history of this landscape when it was landfill and warehouses, before the bulldozers moved in. Eastside Community Heritage collected oral histories of those who worked here or live close by, as part of an archive on the Thames Gateway.

The pop group Saint Etienne, who used the transformation of the Royal Festival Hall in 2006 as the subject for the film This Is Tomorrow, did something similar for the Lea Valley with their film and soundtrack What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day?

One East Ender who remembers those days is Peter Bradbury. I discovered him cycling along the Greenway, three days into his retirement. He used to cycle on a race track here before the gates went up. He recalls when the tower blocks appeared in the last great redevelopment of the East End in the 1960s.

These blocks survive; they peer across as the 21st century brings further change. "I don't think local people are prepared for the amount of visitors that will be coming here for the Olympics," he says. "I also think it's not just the event we have to think about but ask ourselves what its legacy will be."

Lance Forman has doubts: "I hear that the four years in which developers are hoping to transform the Olympic site after the games is very ambitious. It will be more like 20 years."

Recently the company AEG has joined the longlist of those bidding to take control of the Olympic Stadium after the event. Having transformed the Millennium Dome into the 02 Arena, the most successful concert venue in the world, things are looking hopeful.

For now, all we can do is overlook the ever-expanding cost of the venture, ignore the ludicrous Olympics logo, and marvel at the buildings that dare to offer a glimpse of the future. If, indeed, this is tomorrow, it might not be a bad place to be.