In response to requests I will post my impressions of Euro 2004 seen from what is happening in and around Lisbon. This first piece was originally posted yesterday on the Football thread.
The Fan Zone
In Lisboa the early arrivals for Euro2004 have appeared. Easy to spot by their designer wear they are mostly affluent males in their late twenties and early thirties in small groups of three or four. The journalists stand out from the crowd, here early to write their background pieces, report on training camps, the stadia and atmosphere leading up to the opening match. They wear their accreditation on multicoloured ribbon hung round their necks emblazoned with the Mastercard logo and sit in groups arranged by nationality in the waterside restaurants and bars on the World Fair site. The fans, and their raucous cacophony, their badge of allegiance, will arrive closer to match-day, descend in a storm and move on to the next encounter.
The World Fair site looks glorious, flanked along one side by the silky green blue Tejo and boasting the usual crop of outlandish buildings obligatory for all such events it is a three-kilometre stretch of entertainment. There must be more than three hundred restaurants and bars of every imaginable type, there are arenas, concert halls, the aquarium, marinas, shops, play areas, gardens, and water features. The planting looks magnificent, as if it has spruced itself up for the occasion, pergola walkways festooned with blazing bougainvillea in shocking pink or the deepest of reds, cool velvet green palm forests, dotted with orange beaked strelitzia; and everywhere the sound of water. Bright tiled fountains spouting water across the playing children, a waterfall behind which you may pass, a water play area where you can damn streams, make wheels turn or use water to make tunes.
I expect this is where most football visitors will come to eat drink and dance away the night. They will know it as the World Fair or Expo site; it has another history. In the dock around which the Fair site is built was once an airport. Pan Am Clippers – flying boats - landed here from 1935 en-route from New York to Marseilles, via the Azores and Lisboa, the journey took 29 hours. Flying boats pretty much vanished at the end of the Second World War and the advent of long-range aircraft and the dock fell into disuse. Over the years the dock became clogged with silt and surrounded by ‘dirty’ industry, a gas production plant, Lisboa’s main abattoir, and sand and gravel operations. When I lived hear in the 1980’s I worked on behalf of an English client who wanted to turn the Flying Boat dock into a marina. That plan was discarded, too much bad development bounded the dock, and another site chosen in the estuary.
I worked with the then Lisboa City Architect, a pleasant man Tuella by name, like the wine, distinguished by his twisted teeth and almost translucent skin, and a young architect for the Lisboa Port Authority, Morgado. I drew a plan for them showing how the waterfront could be developed into entertainment zones, waterside restaurants and parks, its old cargo and passenger function now virtually extinct. I fought tooth and nail to get a Law passed through the Portuguese Parliament that would allow the Port Authority to grant long leases on land it legally owned to allow this new development to commence, including our marina project. The law was the very last Parliamentary act that the Prime Minister Mario Soares signed before he left party politics to become the President of Portugal.
The next week we signed our lease with the Port Authority. Our English client had arranged development funding with a division of Lloyd’s Bank in Portugal, the funding was transferred to his account, and he disappeared with £250,000 blowing four years of hard labour. He was never traced.
It was a body blow, took me years to recover but today I was able to walk along the World Fair site with my head held high aware of the changes I forced that opened the door for the development of the Lisboa waterfront. It would have happened anyway, but I like to think I played my part.
I guess the point of all this is to balance life’s pluses and minuses and try to settle ones mind that some of the effort, some of the time, brings reward and pleasure, not necessarily to oneself.
Enjoy the football.
The Fan Zone
In Lisboa the early arrivals for Euro2004 have appeared. Easy to spot by their designer wear they are mostly affluent males in their late twenties and early thirties in small groups of three or four. The journalists stand out from the crowd, here early to write their background pieces, report on training camps, the stadia and atmosphere leading up to the opening match. They wear their accreditation on multicoloured ribbon hung round their necks emblazoned with the Mastercard logo and sit in groups arranged by nationality in the waterside restaurants and bars on the World Fair site. The fans, and their raucous cacophony, their badge of allegiance, will arrive closer to match-day, descend in a storm and move on to the next encounter.
The World Fair site looks glorious, flanked along one side by the silky green blue Tejo and boasting the usual crop of outlandish buildings obligatory for all such events it is a three-kilometre stretch of entertainment. There must be more than three hundred restaurants and bars of every imaginable type, there are arenas, concert halls, the aquarium, marinas, shops, play areas, gardens, and water features. The planting looks magnificent, as if it has spruced itself up for the occasion, pergola walkways festooned with blazing bougainvillea in shocking pink or the deepest of reds, cool velvet green palm forests, dotted with orange beaked strelitzia; and everywhere the sound of water. Bright tiled fountains spouting water across the playing children, a waterfall behind which you may pass, a water play area where you can damn streams, make wheels turn or use water to make tunes.
I expect this is where most football visitors will come to eat drink and dance away the night. They will know it as the World Fair or Expo site; it has another history. In the dock around which the Fair site is built was once an airport. Pan Am Clippers – flying boats - landed here from 1935 en-route from New York to Marseilles, via the Azores and Lisboa, the journey took 29 hours. Flying boats pretty much vanished at the end of the Second World War and the advent of long-range aircraft and the dock fell into disuse. Over the years the dock became clogged with silt and surrounded by ‘dirty’ industry, a gas production plant, Lisboa’s main abattoir, and sand and gravel operations. When I lived hear in the 1980’s I worked on behalf of an English client who wanted to turn the Flying Boat dock into a marina. That plan was discarded, too much bad development bounded the dock, and another site chosen in the estuary.
I worked with the then Lisboa City Architect, a pleasant man Tuella by name, like the wine, distinguished by his twisted teeth and almost translucent skin, and a young architect for the Lisboa Port Authority, Morgado. I drew a plan for them showing how the waterfront could be developed into entertainment zones, waterside restaurants and parks, its old cargo and passenger function now virtually extinct. I fought tooth and nail to get a Law passed through the Portuguese Parliament that would allow the Port Authority to grant long leases on land it legally owned to allow this new development to commence, including our marina project. The law was the very last Parliamentary act that the Prime Minister Mario Soares signed before he left party politics to become the President of Portugal.
The next week we signed our lease with the Port Authority. Our English client had arranged development funding with a division of Lloyd’s Bank in Portugal, the funding was transferred to his account, and he disappeared with £250,000 blowing four years of hard labour. He was never traced.
It was a body blow, took me years to recover but today I was able to walk along the World Fair site with my head held high aware of the changes I forced that opened the door for the development of the Lisboa waterfront. It would have happened anyway, but I like to think I played my part.
I guess the point of all this is to balance life’s pluses and minuses and try to settle ones mind that some of the effort, some of the time, brings reward and pleasure, not necessarily to oneself.
Enjoy the football.
