LONDON VAUXHALL DEALERS

The taekwondo world No1, Aaron Cook, is preparing to take the British Olympic Association to the high court in London over his non-selection for the London 2012 Olympics.

Speaking publicly for the first time since GB Taekwondo last month omitted him from its 2012 squad, the 21-year-old said on Wednesday that he felt "let down, frustrated and angry" at the selection of Lutalo Muhammad ahead of him in the male -80kg category, despite him having a world ranking of only 59. Cook announced plans to take legal action after the BOA endorsed his omission last Friday despite an appeal.

Cook's lawyers, Harbottle & Lewis have taken advice from the leading barrister Michael Belloff QC and will send the BOA a formal pre-action letter in the next 24 hours, Cook's agent, Jamie Cunningham said. As part of the case they will argue the BOA is acting in restraint of trade. They are also seeking to take the BOA to the court of arbitration for sport in Lausanne.

"It has been the hardest couple of weeks of my life," Cook said. "I have had to try and keep the training up and in my mind I am still competing at the Olympics. I feel like I am being cheated. I am not very happy. We have got to fight for what is right. I feel I should be at the Olympic Games and we have to fight for that."

Under IOC guidelines, Cook's camp believe they have until 6 July to salvage his dreams of competing for gold at the Excel Centre in London on 10 August.

Cook said he believed his non-selection stemmed from his decision to leave GB Taekwondo's training camp 12 months ago and prepare on his own.

"They feel let down I left the GB academy," he said. "They are not happy I left their world class performance programme … It is all down to GB Taekwondo. They are the ones bringing the sport into disrepute. I feel let down, frustrated and angry."

Asked if his departure was acrimonious, he said: "I wouldn't say it was friendly, I wouldn't say it was bitter. It was somewhere in between."

He also said he believed the BOA's reluctance to reverse GB Taekwondo's decision was "very political" and "they are under pressure from other governing bodies".

GB Taekwondo has insisted its objective has been "to nominate athletes who will provide the Great Britain team with the best chance of medal success at London 2012".

Cook dismissed concerns, reportedly raised by GB Taekwondo in a selection panel meeting, that a recent change in the wording of the rules about kicks to the head could restrict his ability to score points, saying it was a minor change and there were many other ways to win a fight. He also said it was wrong to question his ability to perform under pressure in front of a partisan home crowd, pointing out that he won the Olympic test event.

Cook's camp admit overturning a decision that has embroiled the International Olympic Committee, the head of the World Taekwondo Federation in Korea and the British sports minister, Hugh Robertson, will not be easy.

"But until it is dead we are not going to give up," said Cunningham.

Cook is also awaiting the outcome of a review of the selection process by the sport's international governing body. He responded bullishly to claims by Muhammad that he would have been willing to have had a fight with Cook to eliminate the controversy around the selection process. "I think it is convenient he's saying this after he was ratified," said Cook. "There was no talk of this before. I feel I am world No1 and I don't have to prove myself. If it is my last chance to get to the Olympic Games I would fight him any time, any place, anywhere."

Cunningham said Cook's camp have established that it is theoretically possible to stage a preliminary round at the Games which would pit the two men against each other for the right to compete in the competition proper. He predicted it could be "one of the biggest moments of the Olympic Games", but stressed it required surmounting "a thousand barriers".

"We should be ashamed in this country that we have a world No1 that is not going to the Olympics," Cunningham said.

Competing views about East End life after London 2012 are sharply crystalised amid the public housing architecture of the Carpenters estate in Stratford, which stands on the fringe of the Olympic Park, overlooked by the red spirals of the Orbit tower.

The vision of the planners, led by Newham council's ebullient Labour executive mayor, Sir Robin Wales, is for the Carpenters to make way for a new campus for University College London (UCL), enhancing the life prospects of the neighbourhood and enriching hard-up Newham as a whole.

An estate resident, Mary Finch, takes a bleaker line: "I think that the Olympics has lost me my home." She has lived on the Carpenters for 40 years and is disinclined to depart quietly. "I think they're gonna have to come in here and drag me out. Why should somebody be able to force you out of your home? A home that's got nothing wrong with it, that's standing solid? I do not want to go."

Slow dispersal of the estate's residents, mostly to alternative dwellings nearby, has been in progress for some time. This has been justified for Wales by the need to embrace a host of development opportunities created not only by the draw of the Games and the park but also, just as importantly, by the economic arteries formed by the improved transport hub at Stratford station. Already, the giant Westfield Stratford City shopping centre has been a hit."It's always a balance if you want to do something for an area," Wales says. "What is the wider community getting at the expense of the inconvenience caused to local residents? People in Carpenters are concerned. I would be too. I completely understand that. But with UCL we would get an amazing, top university coming to the area. Our vision is for science and hi-tech providing jobs and skills. It would be such a good offer from the point of view of our kids."

Finch is not alone in being unenthusiastic. Two younger residents, Joe Alexander and Osita Madu, are driving forces in the campaign group Carp – Carpenters Against Regeneration Plan – which has been quarrelling with Wales's pledges to treat residents properly, bombarding him with questions at public meetings. They reason that the Carpenters works well as a community, so why dismantle it? "We're not some kind of social ill or blight on the landscape that needs help," says Maduu. "Somehow Newham council thinks we're a social problem that needs to be addressed."

"We voted for a mayor and got a dictator," adds Alexander.

It is, in many ways, an archetypal urban regeneration conflict between local authorities on a mission to improve, and those on their patch who fear they only stand to lose. Strife also marked the clearance of the Olympic Park site, when a twilit labyrinth of small industrial concerns was removed from the land on which the array of sports venues now awaits the world's athletic elite.

Among them was H Forman and Son, a family salmon-smoking business founded in east London by a Jewish migrant from Odessa in 1905. The proprietor, Harry Forman's great-grandson Lance, had his premises where the Olympic stadium now is. He fought a long compensation battle and celebrated victory with an email to the Games organiser Lord Coe, a former Olympic champion whom he'd been due to cross-examine at a public inquiry. The email said: "You can run, but you can't hide."

The upshot is a handsome, salmon-pink building on a bank of the river Lea, containing not only a smokery, but also a restaurant and an art gallery in a location long called, with glorious suitability, Fish Island. Olympic dignitaries and others now congregate there. The stadium looms across the water. Forman will soon erect a pop-up corporate hospitality venue on a piece of adjoining land he owns, complete with recreational beach volleyball court. Speedo was the first big name to take space in this Fish Island Riviera, and Forman is finalising discussions with others.

"We're going to have some luxury yachts along the riverfront," he enthuses. "Sixty palm trees are being shipped in. We're going to have this beach club that turns into a nightclub."

Forman hopes to emerge a winner from the Games, but says business is still recovering from the disruption caused by compulsory purchase. He hopes to be part of long-term rejuvenation by developing the land his Riviera will briefly occupy, perhaps with a mixture of homes and boutiques, and facilities for the arts community that has flourished in recent years in former warehouses along the towpath in Hackney Wick. Forging links, he invited a graffiti artist to enhance his restaurant's toilets. In the gents, fine silver fish leap skywards above the urinals.

"I think the area was regenerating anyway," Forman says, looking across at the stadium. "But the existence of the park ought to help. I think when people come here they're amazed at how impressive it already is and how easy to get to."

London's outgoing Olympic legacy chief, Margaret Ford, also gives an upbeat assessment of the post-Games future of the 200-hectare park and its immediate surroundings, although she warns that expecting it to be "the catalyst for the regeneration of the whole of east London", has "never been entirely realistic". Citing prior experience with renewing England's coalfield communities, she stressed the need for "continued investment and belief over a long period".

Ford steps down as chair of the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) this month, having led it and its predecessor, the Olympic Park Legacy Company, since May 2009. She says the park should be an example of how you "change the psychology" about an area. "You're hoping that the whole view of investing in east London changes by persuading people that it is a fabulous place to come to and do business and invest."

She accepts that a great fear with large regeneration projects is that the wealth they attract fails to benefit existing residents, many of whom are in pressing need. Canary Wharf, whose glass towers pierce the skyline a short distance away, is often condemned as the ultimate example. "The concern is that the park will become a sort of golden city on a hill surrounded by a sea of poverty," says John Biggs, a former City analyst and senior Labour member of the London Assembly, who represents three of the six Olympic boroughs – Tower Hamlets, Newham and Barking and Dagenham.

Ford, a Labour peer held in high regard across the political spectrum, says she and her board have been "utterly preoccupied from day one" with ensuring that local people derive the maximum value from the post-Games plans, and with facilitating the Olympic boroughs' goal of economic convergence with the richer west and centre of London. She is proud of creating training and schemes and close links with local schools. "The big game-changers will be jobs and changes in educational attainment and aspiration for a lot of families in east London," she says.

Ford will depart with most of the arrangements made for putting the permanent sporting venues and other attractions to post-Games community use, and with decisions in the pipeline for the three big jigsaw pieces not yet in place:

• The commercial occupants, either a fashion hub or digital "innovation city", for the two buildings the media will use during the Games.

• The long-running search for tenants for the main stadium, very likely to include a football club.

• The determination of planning applications for the future development of the park as a residential area and visitor destination.

Five neighbourhoods will form within the boundaries of the park over the next 20 years, with the first, Chobham Manor, due to be completed at the end of 2014. Ford emphasised the importance of including sufficient genuinely affordable housing. "I think we need to remember there was quite a big promise made to the communities in east London about the houses being affordable – either affordable to rent or affordable to buy. I think it's one they are not going to forget."

While pointing out that the LLDC remains committed to 35% of the up to 8,000 homes it plans to see built on the park being affordable – in addition to 3,000 that the Athletes' Village will be converted into – she felt it was a matter for regret for London as a whole that the government's new funding approach means "affordable" rent can now be up to 80% of local market rates, which even in poorer parts of London are high compared with the rest of the country.

"I think Londoners are desperately short of affordable housing. It's definitely short of good-quality social housing [which has far lower rents]. If we mean what we say about needing to house all of our key workers, we need to house lots of people in lower-paid jobs who make this city work then, yes, I would say moving to 80% of market rents will cause some of those people not to be able to afford properties."

Another Olympic borough mayor, Tower Hamlets' independent Lutfur Rahman, who, like Wales, is a member of the LLDC board, has called for more homes for social rent among the 800 housing units proposed for the Olympic Park neighbourhood to be called Sweetwater, which will fall within his boundaries.

Ford, who has 33 years' experience of delivering regeneration programmes under both Labour and Conservative governments, is to be replaced by the Conservative politician Daniel Moylan, the appointee of London's mayor, Boris Johnson, to whom the LLDC is accountable. The selection of Moylan, an experienced councillor in Royal Kensington and Chelsea whom Johnson made his deputy as chair of Transport for London two years ago, has caused some disquiet among political opponents.

Biggs says that although he likes the urbane Moylan – "he's fun to talk to" – he worries that he is not equipped to follow someone with Ford's track record. "The truth is, he doesn't know anything about regeneration." There's an ideological issue too. "The point of bodies like the development corporation is to do the things the market can't or won't, and Daniel is the sort of politician who thinks red-in-tooth-and-claw market forces will take care of everything."

Ford, though, says she's confident Johnson has made a good choice and praises him for allowing her and her chief executive, Andrew Altman, to produce a new masterplan for the park. The one she'd inherited, she says, "pretty much had the place populated by high rise buildings. Why would you stuff it full of flats when it's an obvious family housing neighbourhood, given the green space and the venues? We didn't want to create some pastiche of the Old Curiosity Shop, but a place that had squares and crescents and little pocket parks – the kinds of things that make London quite higgledy piggledy but recognisably London. Boris was hugely encouraging."

She gathered intelligence for the masterplan on "mystery shopping" excursions – chatting to people in cafes and the old Stratford shopping centre. "They wanted front gardens, back gardens for their kids to play in, really good lighting, lots of storage space, nice green spaces, somewhere they can afford and a decent school – it's not bloody rocket science."

When the park begins to reopen for the public next July, its name will change to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Ford believes the royal touch will enhance local attachment: "It's about creating a different feel about the place. It's about people having a pride in it."

Even so, while Olympic borough schools gear up for the excitement of the summer, renaming their classes Helsinki, Tokyo and Beijing, parents express a mix of views about the value of the changes underway. Martin Sadler, a resident of Hackney who works in education and lives with his wife and two daughters not far from the park, foresees a good and a bad side.

"I think this part of Hackney will start feeling a bit more like central London and less like east London," he says. "I've lived here for over 20 years, and it's always been a traditional East End sort of place – a real mixture of people, plenty of cheap accommodation. It's already becoming more affluent, partly because the schools have improved. That brings good things with it, but there are worries too. I think London could be getting more like Paris – that doughnut effect, with the poorer people having to move out of the centre."

That is not the outcome legacy idealists say they have in mind. Time will tell if they manage to avoid it.

The home of this year's Olympic Games and the Diamond Jubilee celebrations for Britain's Queen Elizabeth is also the world's top destination this year, according to an index released by global credit card company MasterCard on Monday.

MasterCard's Worldwide Index of Global Destination Cities predicted that London will see 16.9 million people arrive by air compared with a million less for second place city Paris and miles ahead of New York at 13th place with 7.6 million arrivals.

The index also said that London, for the second year running, will attract the highest international visitor spend at US$21.1 billion, just ahead of New York at US$19.4 billion. Sydney ranked 3rd for the Asia-Pacific region for highest spend with US$11 billion, behind Bangkok and Singapore.

"London offers better value for money than New York," MasterCard Worldwide's global economic advisorYuwa Hedrick-Wong said.

The queen's diamond jubilee saw London fill with visitors from abroad and around Britain for four days of celebrations at the start of June and the Olympics which will take place at venues in and around London from July 27 to August 12 is expected to pull in visitors from all over the planet.

"As our fantastic Diamond Jubilee celebrations demonstrated, London knows how to throw a party and, as we prepare to host the greatest Games the world has ever seen, it is no surprise our capital is the top choice for tourists," London Mayor Boris Johnson said in a statement along with Mastercard's index.

Well established international destination Bangkok was the other big winner in the index at third place with 12.2 million visitors who will spend US$19.3 billion.

"Bangkok's advantage is that it's a very tolerant culture," Hedrick-Wong said. "That explains its durability, especially attracting Europeans and Americans. I cannot imagine Western visitors doing the same thing in Malaysia, even China."

The Index, which encompasses 132 of the world's most important cities, is being marketed as a new map for understanding global connectivity.

Businesses and investors might find the Index's list of city growth rates of more interest than current rankings. Brazilian and Chinese cities also featured highly in the survey for both visitor numbers and spend.

"The growth patterns show how important cities are," says Hedrick-Wong, "and they're popping up from everywhere. They take on some really important local or regional significance overnight because of a new development."

Expect to hear much more about Recife and Belo Horizonte in Brazil, and Chengdu, Harbin, Xian and Guangzhou in China.

Using information gleaned from 87 airlines, national tourism boards, the United Nations and other global agencies, the MasterCard Index offers an optimistic overall forecast.

Total visitor numbers and cross-border spending will increase by 5.7 per cent and 10.6 per cent respectively for the top 20 destination cities in 2012.

The result is a bright spot in a period of slow world economic output, a persistent euro zone crisis and increased uncertainty in the financial sector.

"The growing need and desire to travel, especially by air, are set to expand in spite of the ups and downs of the business cycles," MasterCard's report said.

In a survey also out on Monday, by Mercer, London was ranked the 25th most expensive city in the world and the most expensive city for expatriates.

World's top 20 destinations for 2012

1. London

2. Paris

3. Bangkok

4. Singapore

5. Istanbul

6. Hong Kong

7. Madrid

8. Dubai

9. Frankfurt

10. Kuala Lumpur

11. Seoul

12. Rome

13. New York

14. Shanghai

15. Barcelona

16. Milan

17. Amsterdam

18. Vienna

19. Beijing

20. Taipei

- Reuters