AT THE bottom of our garden is a school playing field. Not for long, though.

For the past year or so we have been fighting a losing battle to stop it becoming a housing estate. Some people think we are winning because the council keeps revising its plans; those who have been through similar negotiations will beg to differ. The local council, the county council, the deeply unimpressive Diocese of Chelmsford and Tony Blair’s slow-witted sidekick from Hull want this, which means that it will happen.

The land is to be sold to raise money to rebuild the school, which will cost £5 million. The project is a necessary one. The school is in an advanced state of decline, structurally and intellectually, and starting again from scratch is its only hope. Its other big advantage is a sizeable plot of land. So this is where our roads divide.

The way I see it, the various authorities dig deep to give the area the state-of-the-art school it needs. This, combined with playing fields large enough to house outstanding sports facilities for football, rugby, cricket, netball, hockey, tennis, athletics and swimming make the school a flagship for modern educational institutions.

Given the right set of circumstances — land, money and vision — we can show that this should be the regenerative aim throughout Britain. Those with the land and control of the money see it differently. Flog a slice of the field for housing and no one has to put a hand in their pocket. Very progressive.

In the meantime, a few miles away in Weald, near Brentwood, an Olympic-standard mountain bike facility will sprout up. It will be used for little more than a day — the mountain bike event in Athens lasted six hours, the women starting at 11am on Friday, August 27 and finishing at 2pm and the same for the men the next day, including all medal ceremonies — and will be dismantled afterwards. “Cost: £5m. Legacy: none,” said one newspaper in its guide to our Olympic venues.

Not quite true, actually. The indirect legacy of the £5 million spent on a six-hour mountain bike race in Essex — presumably a large slice of which will go towards building the county’s first mountain — is that a local school has to sell its playing field to get back in the game. Unlike our Olympic project, the houses sprouting on that land will not be pulled down at a later date. This is a permanent change to the landscape, a project more long-lasting than that which welcomes our Olympic guests. Without it, perhaps £5 million could be diverted into education, the playing fields of Essex could remain intact and local children genuinely would have their much-ballyhooed sporting inheritance. With it, the only winner is McAlpine’s.

Yesterday, I watched another mawkish “think of the little ones” news item. It focused on a school near Stratford, East London. The children sang the song they had made up especially for the Olympics and talked excitedly about their dreams of gold medals and national pride. Then the cameras filmed them running. Not a blade of grass in sight.

They sprinted across what could easily have been mistaken for a run-down car park. The concrete surface was rutted and pitted to such an extent that the white lines marking the lanes looked to have been drawn by a drunk. Of course, the reporter glossed over this tiny cloud in our Olympic blue sky, just as chuckle-headed interviewers have failed to grasp that there are still 300 businesses employing 11,000 Londoners in Marshgate Lane, where our Olympic Park will be. “What is the problem? You’ll be compensated.”

Lance Forman, who has the oldest salmon-smoking business in Britain, inconveniently located where Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, thinks a running track should stand, has lost count of the times he has heard that in the past seven days. As he feared, in the week after the vote went London’s way, no one wanted to hear that a thriving business community was the collateral damage in London’s quest for a brand new sandpit.

Last week, representatives of three Marshgate Lane businesses were invited to be studio guests on ITV’s The London Programme. A lively debate with Livingstone was intended. They did not get that chance. Their contribution was lost beneath endless Olympic flag-waving until, with seconds remaining, Alastair Stewart, the presenter, announced that the show was out of time, asked a watered-down question on their behalf, took Livingstone’s answer at face value and the credits rolled.

Forman fared little better on radio. “What’s the problem?” a chump on Radio 5 Live asked. “You’ll be compensated.”

Actually, relocation, not compensation, is the prime issue: finding somewhere for 300 businesses to go in a city where land is at a premium. The Arup report, on which the 2012 bid is based, states that 160,000 square metres of employment workspace will be created but as much as 380,000 square metres may need to be relocated, away from the site. Now try finding it.