Olympic track ready for athletes

Olympic Stadium from Greenway, October 2011

The track for the Olympic athletes has been engineered for fast running. Work on the track is now finished. A range of large, medium and small companies have been involved in managing all aspects of the project, supplying the expertise and the materials. At the moment the stadium is surrounded by an unfinished landscape. The track will be covered for protection until the rest of the stadium is fitted out.

Glimpse of the running track

The engineering company, Sir Robert McAlpine, had overall responsibility for the main stadium. Their success with the Emirates Stadium helped their bid to succeed. The steel was supplied by Watson Steel of Bolton.  Apparently  some of this steel was reshaped from recycled leftovers from a major gas pipeline project.


The running track has been supplied by the Italian company Mondo. The track is made from vulcanised rubber. Mondo explains that the design of the material has been informed by detailed analysis of the biomechanics of athletes feet as they interact with the track surface. This has to take into account the contrasting needs of sprinters and long-distance runners.


Thanks to the London Marathon Charitable Trust, UK athletes are able to train of the same type of track as that in the Olympic Stadium because identical tracks have been laid in the Lee Valley and in Loughborough at the national performance centres where our athletes train.

The Geology of Music

I have found it hard to respond with enthusiasm to events, or artefacts, that try to create meaning from the interaction between science and the arts. Nevertheless, I went along to Camden Forge this evening to see what I could make of a programme called The Geology of Music. The first part of the programme combined live music on piano, cello and bass clarinet with electronic music and film. This is what attracted me because I am a fan of the bass clarinet - especially when played by Sarah Watts.

A cross section of rocks containing the new – but very old – fossil sponges.
Photograph: Maloof Lib/Situ studio/Situ Studio

The music was inspired by discoveries made by Adam Maloof and his team. This led to the second part of the programme during which Adam was interviewed about the significance of his find of ancient sponges that has pushed back by 70-90 million years the date at which we know that there was first animal life on Earth.

Adam was interesting on the way that he teamed up with architects and a design studio to create 3D images of the fossils. He was also interesting in the possible implications of his work for the theory of Snowball Earth.

An odd evening. The two parts seemed like separate events to me. Again I failed to detect the insights that science brings to music or music to science - but that's me.

St Pancras Gardens

Tombstones round the Hardy Tree

A reader's tip in the Guardian includes the gardens of St Pancras Old Church in a list of the UK's most eccentric attractions. It seems an odd choice to me because the gardens are full of interest and well worth a visit on any day.


The interest in not just historical (such as the tombstones round the Hardy Tree) or architectural (such as the St John Soane mausoleum); it is also geological as shown by a web site devised by scientist in UCL's Department of Earth Sciences. (Use the drop-down menu from 'St Pancras Gardens' in the top navigation bar to get to the geological details.)

John Soane mausoleum

The gravestones feature a variety of types of rock. The Soane mausoleum, for example, is made of marble surrounding by a balustrade consisting of Portland limestone. The tall Burdett-Coutts memorial is a sundial made of two colours of granite, limestone and sandstone. 


Gravestones can be hundreds of years old so they provide a useful means of observing and measuring the weathering of different types of rock. Weathering of rocks can be caused by: chemicals - acids in rain; physical changes - such as water freezing and expanding and by living organisms - such as the growth of lichens. 

Reflex at the Wellcome Trust

HQ of the Wellcome Trust

The Wellcome Trust has been in the news because its bid to take of the Olympic Park after the 2012 games has been rejected by ministers. The Trust spends about £600 million each year to fund biomedical research. This makes it the biggest funder of research in the UK after the government.

The Trust is also a major patron of artists that explore scientific ideas and imagery. This is symbolised by the architecture of its headquarters building, the special displays and sculpture inside the building within the vast atrium as well its window displays. 

It was the new window display that caught my eye from the top of a passing 390 bus. The display is called 'Reflex' and it responds to passers by and traffic in the Euston Road. The swarming behaviour of the installation is based on an algorithm with mimics the collective behaviour of large groups of creatures such as birds or ants.

London Overground

Train arriving at Camden Road

The blogger at London Reconnections has recently written a series of three posts about the past, present and future of the London Overground. So far TfL has scored a big hit with the way that it has brought to life the tired old services that used to run on the North London Line and other services that now make up the new network. Another blogger, Diamond Geezer, has documented the improvement in the frequency of trains thanks to the new service.

Overground crossing the Canal

The Class 378 Capitalstar trains were made by Bombadier. This is the company based in Derby that recently failed to be selected as the preferred bidder to supply the new trains for the Thameslink service.

The Overground will make a complete circuit of London once the orbital route to Clapham Junction to Surrey Keys is complete. However trains will never make a complete circuit.

Paddington Station

The most recently decorated 'span 4' at Paddington

A trip to Exeter and back this last weekend reminded me that Paddington is one of the pleasanter London station for travellers. This is thanks to brilliant engineering in Victorian times and recent refurbishment  which was initially carried out according to a design by the architect Nicholas Grimshaw. Network Rail publishes a mini-guide to the features of the station.

Polished limestone has brightened the platforms while travellers can wait and shop in the Lawn - an area that was long ago station master's garden.

Paddington was built using the same techniques as the Crystal Palace. It opened in 1854 just three years after the Great Exhibition.

Brunel at Paddington

The statue near the entrance on platform 1 celebrates the engineer, Brunel, who worked with the architects and designers Matthew Digby Wyatt and Owen Jones to create this spectacular station. 

Already much of the redecorated ironwork has been blackened by the soot from the diesel locomotives. However the line of arches in 'span 4' is showing the glory of the colour scheme because it has only recently been unveiled. 

Meanwhile the next engineering challenge is the design and construction of an underground addition to Paddington as part of Crossrail.

The paradoxes of London cycling

Docking station near Warren Street

The Barclays cycle hire scheme has been running for a year. The Londonist blog shows that the scheme has had mixed reviews. The bikes have proved remarkably robust and very few have been stolen. However the IT system for  hiring and charging is unreliable. Some users have been frustrated by the fact that they cannot reliable find a bike to hire when they want one or that there is no dock free at the end of their journey. However others have been inspired to buy their own bikes.

The scheme has also stimulated technical ingenuity, such as the London Bike Share map devised by Oliver O’Brien, a researcher and software developer at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), an interdisciplinary research group at UCL in London. This continuously tracks and displays the number of parked bikes and free docks at each of the docking stations. 

It might seem that Transport for London wants to promote cycling, yet today there has been a big protest on Blackfriars Bridge because TfL's traffic engineers are making the bridge more dangerous for cyclists by adding more lanes of traffic and raising the speed limit. The political campaign been led by bloggers who have exposed the failure of TfL's engineers to treat all travellers as equal while giving priority to the smooth flow of motor vehicles. They seem to ignore the fact that, over 24 hours, cycles make 16% of the traffic. That rises to nearly 36% of the traffic in the morning rush hour.

So TfL provides the means to cycle - at least for some - but does not engineer the roads so that cycles have their rightful amount of space to ride safely.