Life on the Olympic Fringe

It's not really an island at all but feels very much like one, literally cut off from the rest of the city by canals, to the south by the elevated Northern Outfall Sewer and to the west by the A12.

Fish Island has a unique 19th-century scale and character, thanks to the rational, regular street plan, and the combination of high-rise warehouse buildings and open yards.

Right now it feels especially disconnected, with buses diverted because of the Olympic works, and Hackney Wick station closed until June because of engineering works.

Visitors to Hackney Wick and Fish Island today will see that the cranes just across the canal herald the massive change that is already coming to this placid neighbourhood.

At the end of Dace Road, one of London's best-preserved 19th-century streets, is picturesque Old Ford Lock (the lock-keeper's cottages there were once the home of C4's Big Breakfast). Beyond that and through the trees is the immense bowl of the 80,000-capacity Olympic Stadium, nearing completion.

The change is already detectable in Hackney Wick too. If you stand on the westbound platform of the London Overground (final destination Richmond) you can see an old warehouse building that has been converted into handily located rooms for Olympic construction workers ("Fresh laundry and cleaning weekly"), and hi-visibility jackets stream over the bridges crossing the canal at the end of the day's work at the Olympic site.

Disused lock-ups advertise their proximity to the Olympic site with a hopeful desperation. But there's also a sense of calm around here.

The streets are quiet, and the handsome 19th-century warehouses on Fish Island, and scattered mature trees, give this place a dignified character.

It's not just the architecture that makes Hackney Wick feel like a special place. There is a thriving residential community. The area is also home to anarchist protest groups and guerrilla gardeners, travellers and skip-hire firms.

Research carried out by Muf last year uncovered the extent of the local artistic community (some of London's most important artists have studios in the area, including Michael Landy, Phyllida Barlow and Gary Webb) and there are more than 600 studios in Hackney Wick and Fish Island, twice as many as in artistic hot-spot Dalston.

Industries such as printing and food manufacturing are also hanging on in the area despite the disruption the Olympics has brought to transport connections.

If this story sounds familiar, you're not the only one to have noticed. The Shoreditch Trust says "Hackney Wick is what Shoreditch was 50 years ago".

The growing number of galleries, with the Elevator Gallery prominent among them, testifies to that attractive mix of culture and industry that has heralded regeneration and gentrification in other parts of London, and suggests that a 50-year timescale is too long - by a factor of 10.

Muf's approach is to make the most of the rich culture of these two side-by-side neighbourhoods, to harness the momentum of the Olympics to lasting effect for the area without sacrificing its existing activities.

"One of the most interesting things revealed in our mapping [last year] was that many of the legacy promises of the media centre, in terms of creative uses, are already here," says Muf partner Liza Fior. "The challenge is to intensify those assets and to find desirable uses that can be shared between visitors and existing residents."

The pragmatic stuff will get done. There is a need to upgrade existing streets and make the most of the new bridge links between Hackney Wick and the Olympic Park.

But Muf will also conduct a further, more extensive, survey of the area, establishing existing uses, ecology, street lighting and furniture, play spaces and opportunities for public art.

The architects hope that this will result in new links between communities. One early proposal is for a series of partnerships between artists and local businesses in the area called "Made in Hackney Wick", to encourage dialogue between art and business and establish tangible signs of the existing creative and economic activity in the area.

Temporary installations, manufactured and designed in Hackney Wick, will be key to this. "Temporary does not have to mean second best," says Fior. "Temporary is a means of introducing into inert development sites fragile and desirable uses like play, culture and the bucolic, that are normally the first to be cut when a project is built."

Two weeks ago, a report from the Greater London Authority highlighted the risk that the Olympic site could become "an island of prosperity" in east London, and that the legacy for the surrounding communities was unclear.

The six areas adjacent to the site - clockwise from the west - Hackney Wick and Fish Island, Hackney Marshes, Leyton, Stratford Town Centre, Stratford High Street and Sugarhouse Lane - are now being masterplanned by architects trying to cajole and crowbar the behemoth of the Olympics into something like a normal London context.

Eleanor Fawcett, of Design for London (the Mayor and GLA's urban design and architecture office), explains: "Many of the local town centres - Leyton, Roman Road, Homerton, Stratford - all operate with their backs to what is becoming the Olympic Park. The legacy of the park needs to have something to plug into."

The modest budgets of the Olympic Fringe projects (in the low single figures of millions of pounds) belie how hard they will have to work.

Look to the south-western edge of the site and the worst of all outcomes is visible, with the hideous blocks of housing lining Stratford High Street evidence of developers' desires to make a quick buck.

Even the London Development Agency - another of the Mayor's agencies - admits that there have been mistakes here, and these do not encourage optimism about other fringe sites.

But places such as Hackney Wick and Fish Island can be bulwarks against the generally antiseptic architectural character of the Olympic site and the bombastic cynicism of the housing developers' architecture because of the richness of the communities and uses they accommodate.

Muf's ideas can help local communities resist the housing blocks of Stratford, and embed the culture of the place in plans for the future.

When the Olympic Park is complete, Hackney Wick and Fish Island will have been transformed from a cut-off archipelago to a key link between two major public parks in east London - Victoria Park to the west and the Olympic Park to the east.

If Muf's projects can bind its residents together, Hackney Wick and Fish Island will become a busier, more beautiful and still vibrant place of cultural and material production.

If one legacy of the Olympics could be an understanding of what is worth preserving in places such as Fish Island, it would be a worthy one indeed.