What I most recall about making Memory Marathon was that it not so much a marathon as a sprint. The artist Simon Pope and I had worked up a speculative pitch, which we submitted in June 2009, in response to an open call from the newly instituted Olympic Delivery Authority for what would be the first of many art and public engagement projects to take place in the lead-up to London 2012. Our proposal – in which Simon would walk a 26-mile marathon route through the five London boroughs that would be hosting the Games, accompanied, on his journey, by over a hundred participants who would each recount to him, on video, their personal memories of Olympics past – was already ambitious enough. Doubly so, when we learned, after winning the commission, that the project needed to be filmed, exhibited and evaluated by the end of the financial year (ie 31 March 2010). We had already accepted that the challenge we had signed up to was never going to be a walk in the park. Now it suddenly became a race against time – and we needed to hit the ground running.

Most of the remainder of that summer was spent putting preparations in place. Film and Video Umbrella’s small team (of seven, at the time) was supplemented by outreach and engagement specialists Mel Larsen and Anna Godsiff, who worked with us to attract and enlist the 104 Londoners we needed to walk their own 400-metre section of the route. By September, we were hosting regular workshop sessions at Stratford Town Hall, which local residents (and potential walkers and talkers) were invited to attend. The differing ages and diverse social/cultural backgrounds of those present offered a vibrant encapsulation of the demographic make-up of the East London boroughs where the Olympic events would unfold – a diversity that extended to the individual memories people wanted to share. These drew from a collective wellspring of iconic Olympic moments (the captivating grace of elfin gymnast Olga Korbut, the power and panache of decathlete Daley Thompson, the on-track rivalry between Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett) but often included poignant reminders of where people were watching or listening at the time, gathered round a TV (or radio) with family and friends. 

As these workshop conversations continued, Simon was consolidating the exact details of his marathon route. We had agreed in principle that its passage through the five boroughs (and ending at the site of the Olympic Park) would join the dots between places where various landmark films had been shot. In the borough of Greenwich, for example, it was short step from Southmere Lake in Thamesmead (a key location in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’) to Maryon Wilson Park in Charlton (a centrepiece in Antonioni’s ‘Blow-Up’). Other boroughs had similar sites with equally resonant echoes and associations. In Newham, the derelict King George V Dock, now part of London City Airport, features as an atmospheric backdrop in John Mackenzie’s ‘The Long Good Friday’, while in Tower Hamlets it is possible to zigzag between the old haunts of renowned experimentalists Derek Jarman, Humphrey Jennings and Patrick Keiller and revisit locations used in ‘Jubilee’, ‘Fires Were Started’ and ‘London’. There were many others to boot – and among those we were especially keen to be guided by were movies like Joan Littlewood’s ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’ or documentaries like Stanley Reed’s ‘Neighbourhood 15’ which portrayed London at earlier moments of architectural transformation and urban regeneration.

It was more than a little nostalgic rediscovering, deep in Film and Video Umbrella’s archive, the original Ordnance Survey maps on which Simon first plotted the Memory Marathon route. And it has been equally fascinating going back and walking various sections of it, as I have started to do recently. If the streets and parks and riverside paths that Memory Marathon moved through offered a vivid then-and-now comparison with the same areas of the capital that had been recorded on film in previous decades, the changes wrought in the fifteen years since the project was made are equally noticeable. The old London Docklands, left high and dry in the 1960s and 70s, continue their conversion into premier real estate – part of a wave of regeneration-cum-gentrification that has rolled out across swathes of East London. And nowhere more so than in and around the Olympic Park itself, where places like Hackney Wick, for example, are almost unrecognisable from how I remember them a decade and a half ago.

If the urban landscape has transformed, so has the wider cultural space around it – most obviously via the influence of social media, which had only barely appeared on the scene in 2009. An armchair arena par excellence, social media has become the spectator sport de nos jours: a bearpit of competing opinions and perspectives, where individual voices jostle for attention amid the cacophonous presence of everybody else. There are interesting parallels, perhaps, with the popular spectacle of the marathon as both a sporting and social phenomenon – a blue riband event that is now also an occasion for mass participation and public engagement. For many, still the ultimate test of athletic achievement, the modern marathon has become a regular platform for uplifting personal stories – the loneliness of the long-distance runner subsumed into a shared, emotionally-bonding, collective experience.

Although engagement-led, community-centred projects are now very much the vogue in recent contemporary art, they were less so in 2009. And, looking back, it’s possible to see Memory Marathon as an early pacesetter in what has become an increasingly crowded field. As the weeks went by, and further workshops, poster campaigns and local recruitment drives were organised, the participants were gradually lined up, with individuals assigned to (or able to choose) different sections of the now-finalised route. With the clock ticking, a definitive timeline was set, gearing up to a shoot date on Saturday 7 November. As I remember it, the autumn of 2009 was blessed with unseasonably sunny weather, but the Indian summer suddenly broke at the end of October, casting a cloud of uncertainty over proceedings. It rained solidly for a week beforehand, but the sun shone mercifully on the day, bathing London in a radiant glow that echoes the positive energy emanating from the protagonists.

As the Olympic baton passes to Paris this year, Memory Marathon is a flashback to the many different emotions associated with London 2012 – emotions that ranged from genuine excitement at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to genuine concern at the potential impact of an overweening global initiative on the local community. Pope’s film gives voice to those contrasting sentiments as it travels across a swathe of London at the heart of that moment of change. First and foremost, though, Memory Marathon is a testimonial to sport, and the place it holds in so many people’s lives. A compelling example of the way in which sport brings people closer together, it is also a reminder of its capacity to create long-lasting memories. As a record of the backdrop to the 2012 Games, and as a people’s compendium of favourite sporting moments, Memory Marathon continues to be a highlights reel that I need very little excuse to replay and replay.

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Dedicated to the memory of Sarah Weir (1958-2023)

Steven Bode is Associate Director of Film and Video Umbrella.