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@spindrift
It's not a no-go area at all, a new Tesco Metro has opened round the corner on the way to Leytonstone, Maryland Station is getting a massive makeover, the new flats at 160 Stratford High Road are going for £400k, 40% sold to the Chinese. It's rough and scruffy, lots of landlords couldn't give a stuff for their properties and allow them to decay even when the council offer to contribute funding to redevelop and tidy up. The Polish shops were welcomed in Leytonstone, which is only really a shopping paradise if you like motorbike tyres and rancid kebabs. E11 is getting better,slowly, younger people are moving in who can't afford Hackney any more. It's a slow gentrification process, although you could fairly call it a kind of economic ethnic cleansing where poorer people are forced out. The fear is that the athletes' village when converted back into family homes will remain a pocket of affluence surrounded by poverty. The whole area will be very different in two years.