The Financial Times reports that the latest research by economic forecasters Oxford Economics predicts that 294,000 people will visit London during next year’s games. Is that a lot? Four years ago, says the FT, the same organisation put the figure at 322, 000. And that reminds me. Last month, the European Tour Operators Association (ETOA) said that tourist bookings for London next summer had plummeted compared with last. “It won’t be a triumph for tourism,” they said. That’s bad news for the capital. Watch this.

With all the upbeat talk of a games-driven business bonanza and those fears of transport chaos caused by the sheer weight of visitor numbers, you couldn’t be blamed for being surprised that tourism is expected to be hindered rather than helped by the Olympics. Yet it would only be par for the course. A report by the ETOA anticipating London 2012 says:

[T]here is no strong link between hosting sporting events and increased tourism. The audiences regularly cited for such events as the Olympics are exaggerated. Attendees at the Games displace normal visitors and scare tourists away for some time. Both Sydney and Barcelona had “excellent” Olympic Games, but their tourism industries have not significantly benefited.

Thus there appears to be little evidence of any benefit to tourism of hosting an Olympic Games, and considerable evidence of damage. It is vital that the problems experienced by the host cities of past Games be acknowledged and addressed in order to avoid them re-occurring.

A “displacement effect” on tourism numbers is a regular consequence of hosting an Olympics, and London can only hope that it will be at least a partial exception. The longer-term benefits to tourism also seem far from clear. Initiatives from the London Development Agency’s 2009-13 tourism action plan, which included ways to “capitalise on the Olympics”, to September’s £100m post-riots government campaign to attract more visitors and David Cameron’s recent cash boost for the opening and closing ceremonies need to be viewed in that historical light. The term “damage limitation” comes to mind.

They travelled from afar, intent on devotion, bearing gifts of cameras, column inches and hyperbole. As one they worshiped the newborn, glowing ruddy in a humble corner of Trafalagar Square. There was no ox in attendance, though some believe the politician who sired the bus-child is an ass. I was among the host of media congregants bending the knee before his proud creation. Behold, Boris Johnson’s new London bus has manifested in the capital.

Some dismiss the 11.2 metre long, three-doored, double-staircased, diesel-electric serial hybrid vehicle as a mere vanity project. Were it not the season of goodwill, I might be tempted to agree and, furthermore, dub the project emblematic of Boris’ mayoralty as a whole. Yet I’m also confirmed in my view that it’s a good addition to the London fleet.

Though each new bus will cost more than the hybrids already working London’s streets – perhaps £330,000 compared with roughly £300,000 – manufacturers Wrightbus of Ballymena say that its fuel consumption is some 15% better. I like its back end and its sides and though not wholly enamoured of its front, find its interior a delight. The lights are subtle, the moquette rich and bold. The tech is impressive too. “See these bells?” enthused TfL surface transport chief Leon Daniels. “Completely wireless.” The seats are installed with a view to easy floor-cleaning after vomit episodes. They’ve tried to think of everything.

Political opponents have slammed the £7.8 million paid to Wrightbus to develop the vehicle, but TfL says it will recoup that cost through royalties from future orders secured elsewhere. The sum is a tenth of that spent on setting up Boris’s cycle hire scheme, which was recently reported to be on course to make £11 million less than hoped for this year. By comparison, the new bus looks good value for money. Should it have been spent instead on holding down public transport fares, which in January will rise by more than RPI inflation for the fourth consecutive year under Boris? Arguably yes, though delivering a “21st century” successor to the famous, defunct Routemaster was a major Boris manifesto pledge.

Two of the new buses will go into service in February on route number 38 between Victoria and Clapton Pond in Hackney (the latter end, thrillingly adjacent to my home). One of the project’s leading lights explained that at first these will operate “in parallel” with the existing double deckers, and be joined by others as they come off the production line. There should be five by the end of March and once the sixth completes its journey across the Irish Sea they will start replacing the older models on the route. TfL’s initial order is for eight.

There seems no doubt that new bus will continue attracting attention all the way up to mayoral election day May, though there must be a concern that not all of it will be of the right kind. Aside from its bespoke design and the elegance of its insides, the new bus is truly like a Routemaster only in reviving its open rear platform (though in practice this will often be closed off, and only open when a 21st century conductor is on board). Being free to hop on or off the bus at a time of their choosing rather than the driver’s will be a bonus for many passengers, including me, though nostalgia tends to blind us to the feature’s disadvantages.

My memories of the last days of the Routemaster aren’t all fond. One is of one of my sons, then about 12 years old, arriving home quite shaken up having been shoved off the back of one by unseen assailants and landing in the middle of the road. Another is of following a Routemaster in my car down Islington’s Essex Road watching three lads on bicycles competing recklessly to hitch a free ride by holding on to the open platform’s upright pole while the conductor fretted helplessly.

Boris won’t want his new bus to stop being the all-conquering good news story it has been all day. The whole of LBC radio’s Nick Ferrari morning show was broadcast from inside or next to it as it posed at dawn next to City Hall. The new bus doesn’t have a name. Ferrari called it “the first Boris Bus.” Will the nickname stick? The Tory mayor isn’t human if he isn’t hoping so.

All previous installments of Boris’s Bus (A Political Journey) are archived here.

So weird. Hackney riots on the radio. Hackney riots just down the road. What was this Hackney journalist doing? Grilling chops. Well, Hackney children must be fed, even when certain of their local peers are out trashing the neighbourhood. “What’s happening, Daddy?” asked the youngest (aged nine). I kept it light: “Some stupid people are breaking windows.” I’d previously texted my second eldest, who lives nearby, advising him not to go out. Twenty-two year-old males, I believe, are more likely to become victims of random violence than 53 year-old ones (me).

“Was abt to head into stokey for some food!!!,” he replied. “Is it safe there?” How could I know? Things were moving so fast, and not just in Hackney: “Gangs of masked kids popping up everywhere,” I replied. This was laying it on thick, though my wife, heading home from work, had spotted a gang of up to 40 roaming the border with Islington. I needed more spuds. I felt a foolish tremor of anxiety about going to the corner shop. I found it already shuttered, and the proprietor, a lovely man called Abdullah, standing warily outside with two sons and a brother.

By this time I’d already done two tours of riot duty. The first was nipping down to Mare Street at about half three following a tip off from my 15 year-old. “It’s already started, at JD Sports,” she told me, quoting BlackBerry Messenger. Shops on the pedestrianised northern end – known locally as the Narrow Way – were already shut, though people seemed relaxed. I passed a few police on my way to the junction with Amhurst Road and the bridge serving Hackney Central station.

Some men were boarding up a section of the JD shopfront. Had looters been and gone? It all seemed very quiet. People were shopping normally, though here too many stores were closed. Some cop cars came and went. I leaned against a wall to tweet and was suddenly almost knocked over by three youths riding the pavement on their bikes, their faces concealed by scarves. They too melted away. It turned out that the boarding-up of JD was pre-emptive. Was something brewing or was it not?

I wandered for a minute, and then more police arrived: van loads. They pulled up outside Marks and Spencer, piled out in a pack and crossed the road towards the apron of the usually tranquil St John-at-Hackney graveyard and the branch of Coral that occupies the Old Town Hall. Suddenly, they’d snatched two guys and had them pinned against Coral’s wall. A crowd gathered fast. Many were snapping and filming. Kids sat chattering on a wall. I found that I was sharing my tombstone vantage point with an after school play worker I know. “These kids should be back in their yards,” she told me emphatically.

One of the detainees was released, to cheers: at a recent local public meeting about youth crime, Boris was left in little doubt that stop-and-search attracts a lot of opposition around here. I lost track of what happened to the other guy, because suddenly police were moving behind the Corals, past St Augustine’s ancient tower, and then a teenage girl was giving them verbal abuse, and then a crowd had gathered round and an officer bellowed to a colleague by the vans to “Get the NATOs out” – riot helmets. “You should tear gas their asses,” my friend advised a nearby group of constables. They grinned, noncommittally.

The graveyard crowd evaporated as swiftly as it had formed, leaving a small line of cops behind a wall of see-through shields looking as though they’d been inserted into the wrong scene of a film. And then all eyes were back on the Narrow Way, where some sort of stand-off was taking place. At one point the onlookers turned and fled, then turned and crept back. The focus switched again, to the section of Mare Street just behind the railway bridge. By now, the road junction was a cop car park. Buses backed up down Amhurst Road. I saw a missile thrown, but the attacks on police cars being shown on TV via the helicopter overhead was beyond my line of vision.

I went home to write, tweeting on my way that something was going on up Clarence Road but lacking time to stop. I was back there two hours later, and the rest you broadly know: smashed shops, blazing cars, kids hurling things at cops. I and my wife, home by then, were among the disbelieving onlookers. As well as being a depressing, desperate scene, it was a horribly fascinating and oddly social one as well.

We walk up Clarence Road quite often on normal days, and all of a sudden it was in flames as though viewed though some smokey, distorting prism. I bumped into folk I hadn’t seen in years, including a young man who went to the same neighbourhood primary school as most of my children and was a member of its football team when I helped run it. I told him I was there half as a journalist, half as a resident. He said he was there as a sociologist. Perhaps he can help the rest of us make a little sense of what’s gone on.

There are five.

1. As always with urban riots, Tottenham and its aftermath have produced political rock-throwing. A familiar polarisation can be witnessed in mainstream and social media alike. From the right comes condemnation of the criminality, uncritical support for the police and a snorting contempt for any attempt to diagnose the events with reference to their wider social and economic context: unemployment, poverty, historic tensions with the Met and so on. From the left comes, yes, an insistence that the events cannot be truly understood without reference to that wider social and economic context, an insistence that the police must be held to account, and so on.

I’m in the latter camp, but do I also condemn the burning and looting? Yes, stupid, I do. I find it hateful, depressing, selfish, contemptuous, vicious and frightening. My, possibly paranoid, sense that delinquent youths all across the inner city are emboldened by the current mood has ratcheted up my parental anxiety an unwelcome notch or two.

I have no problem with condemnation, only with condemnation in isolation. That is because condemnation on its own is far too easy – so easy, in some mouths, that it becomes a sort of narcissistic vigilantism: my condemnation is bigger than your condemnation; your smaller condemnation condemns you as a secret non-condemner and therefore a closet excuser and justifier, etcetera. The other problem with condemnation unadorned is that it’s a dead end. You condemn. Then what? You have to look for some solutions. Condemning alone is not enough.

2. Rioting is often described as “mindless.” The problem is, it’s not. I know why the word is used: it expresses our incredulity and sometimes points to the rioting’s counter-productiveness – that’s the meaning, I think, that David Lammy deployed when he used “mindless” in his strong and nuanced statement yesterday. But people who riot do have minds, and in these lie the reasons for their rioting.

Those reasons vary, and may be various. They will be bad reasons, even when miserably explicable. But reasons, they are. Call them motives, if you prefer. These may be greed, hatred, a craving for status, for battle and excitement and for an antisocial sort of liberty. Some deep, possibly incoherent rage against authority and a safer, kinder more prosperous world they can’t join might be part of this story too. None of this is evidence of mindlessness, and to declare it so is to hide from reality.

3. Do the riots and their backdrop indicate that the capital’s street criminality is becoming more ingrained? I’ve a sad suspicion that they do. The whole story, beginning with Trident’s operation against Mark Duggan and broadening to smashed shop windows in Enfield and elsewhere, has ushered into the light a still mostly hidden London subculture of guns, thieving and thuggery that normally appears mostly suppressed.

The long-term pattern of overall crime in London is down, but as a careful interrogation of serious violent offences shows, the numbers of teenage and young adult victims of knife and other grave assaults has been rising in recent years – a trend our Mayor has yet to acknowledge. Does anyone believe the drug trade is in decline? Does anyone doubt that localised fraternities of felony are an established part of inner city London life? Does anyone seriously think that the police alone can make them go away?

4. The cops are not perfect: they spin, they’re secretive, they do wrong things. But every inch of riot footage confirms to me that I don’t have what it takes to be one.

5. From MayorWatch:

I’m not sure there’s any practical need for Boris to return from his holiday. Sure, on arrival he could make a few speeches, give some interviews and distract the Met by demanding meetings and briefings. But would any of that really move the situation on?

Probably not, and I detect in some cries for his immediate return the sound of political points being scored. What’s more, Boris’s few words on the phone to the BBC did strike roughly the right chord. It was unfortunate that he twice referred to Mark Duggan as “Michael”, but as well as denouncing the rioting he rightly stressed that there are “legitimate questions” to be put to the police.

The real test of Boris will be to keep striking the right chord and adopting a fitting profile after he gets home. His habit over policing has been to hog the limelight when it makes him look good and duck it when it threatens to be less than flattering. If that changes, at least one good thing will have come out of the horrible events of recent days.

I’m taking a break until early August. I’m heading north, I’m heading back, I’m heading south. While I’m away I wouldn’t want you to be bored. And neither would the chap who made this film.

Back to work? Speak for yourself, young man. Bye.

As London prepares to look at its Olympic best, what limits should there be on displays of sponsors’ logos and livery? The question is raised by the London SE1 website in a piece about “Games time” enhancements to Tower Bridge. The Grade 1 listed building has recently undergone major restoration work and we learned in the spring of plans to install a new lighting system, jointly funded by the City of London Corporation, which owns the bridge, and London 2012 “sustainability partners” EDF and GE.

It was announced last month that the proposals include suspending giant Olympic rings and paralympic agitos from the bridge while the Games are taking place. Planning permission has to be obtained from Southwark Council. London SE1 has perused the documents submitted and says that:

[D]uring the Olympics and Paralympics there will be a daily light show at the bridge which will involve the raising and lowering of the rings and agitos and the display of sponsors’ logos for 30 minutes.

It quotes from a submission by urban design consultants Turley Associates:

Every evening during the respective games, there will be an evening presentation in the form of a lighting display to the bridge which will involve a sequence of colour changes including the lighting of different components of the bridge such as the tower, turrets and bridge span, and launching of the rings/agitos.

It continues:

Fundamental to the funding of the installation of the permanent lighting, Olympic Rings and Paralympic Agitos is the sponsorship recognition of the Olympic partners EDF and GE whose logos and those of the ODA and Olympic rings will be projected onto the lower portions of the two towers.

Should this sort of thing be allowed? London SE1 reported last autumn that plans to place adverts on the shrouds covering scaffolding erected for the restoration work were abandoned due to objections by Tower Hamlets Council – the borough the north end of the bridge occupies – and English Heritage. How will EH, Tower Hamlets and, indeed, Southwark respond to the thought of EDF and GE corporate imagery intruding on Horace Jones’s stately uprights? How do you?

Update, 20 July. English Heritage has been in touch to say that it has yet to receive the planning application, welcomes the improvements to the lighting of the bridge and recognises the unique opportunity for London presented by the Olympics. However, it adds that it is “always mindful of unwelcome precedent-setting concerning the use of commercial advertising on listed buildings and structures.”