ABSTRACT
Anyone visiting one or more of the many symposia on the cultural and creative industries and the UK economy held during the second half of the 2000s (and they were legion) will have been struck by the recurrent references to the 2012 Olympics. Regional representatives from around the UK – as well as those from the north, west and south of London – were united in their desire to claim some regional benefit from the Games and from the money being poured in to regenerate the east end of London and the ‘Thames Gateway’, its Essex/Kent hinterland. Many of the claims were couched in the official discourse, reproduced above from a 2008 ‘strategy document for the creative industries’; but most speakers acknowledged anxiously that the real creative capital was London, and argued for a more equitable distribution of funding and opportunity.
