Create10, running from June 19 to August 1, will hit the streets, parks, office blocks, warehouses and even theatres and concert halls of London’s East End purveying some of the wackiest festival programming so far devised as the core of what the East End will offer London 2012.

It is, says its executive producer Hadrian Garrett, a “festival of doing, because doing is what East End people is all about. It’s new ways of them interacting with their creative neighbours”.

Create10 is the Cultural Olympiad project of the five East End boroughs – Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Greenwich, Newham and Waltham Forest – and is the core of what will become the main Festival 2012.

There was a Create9, there will be a Create 11 and Create12 – and a Create13.

The idea came out of a sentence in the original bid, which announced baldly that there would be a “big East London festival”. Early in 2008 representatives of the five boroughs got round a table – “probably out of fear as much as anything, knowing what had to be done” – with Garrard, and Culture9 the following summer ad the result.

Hadrian Garrard was a session musician before becoming involved with the project of reopening the Hackney Empire theatre, and then the cultural life of Hackney, then Hackney’s contribution to the Olympic programme. Since 2007 he has been one of the 12 creative programmers appointed by the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games across the UK to create an inspiring Cultural Olympiad.

For Culture10, it is by East Enders, for East Enders – and the rest of the world as it passes through, as more and more tourists are in the run up to 2012.

“It is designed to evolve up to 2012 when it will be an unforgettable experience, and then 2013, because there has to be a legacy that will bring the Olympic Park to life long after the games themselves are over” he says.

Last year 822,000 turned up, for the six week vent, 220,00 of them participated in some way, and £13.15 million (more than half of it from non-East Enders) was injected into the local economy for an outlay of just over half a million. The funding comes from the Arts Council, the London Development Agency, the five boroughs, the Bank of America, and artistic partners Station House Opera and the Central School of Speech and Drama.

One aim of the Create series was to get major companies to take the East End seriously, looking that direct for artists and collaborators, and it’s working.

Punchdrunk, the theatre company whose USP is involvement with audiences, is producing its first every opera in collaboration with ENO, and they will do a version The Duchess of Malfi in a disused warehouse in the Royal Albert Docks.

And what Garrard is even more excited about is a thing called You Me Bum Bum Train, winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award, created by the Town Hamlets based Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd, who have been taking the show to different venues since 2004 and changing its nature for each environment. “It is an amazing thing, a cast of 200 for an audience of one, in which you the audience are the focal point of the production so you have to participate” Garrard says. Each single person is taken through a series of vignettes which h they feel have each been created especially for them.

It will be performed in an empty electricity board office block in Bethnal Green, and the real triumph is that it is a co-production with the Barbican for which it fits into the Bite 10 programme as an off-site presentation.

“The important thing is” says Garrard “that we’re not trying to fly something in here from outside, we’re growing something in an organic process that will build up to 2012 and then leave a legacy. It’s a logical thing to do in the East End.”