After the Games

par Richard BROWN

25 janvier 2012 - Londres

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Legacy is a difficult term, but it has been essential to the London 2012 project from the outset.  It was, I think, why we bid.  The former Mayor of London was not a huge fan of sports when this project started, but he was a fan of what the games could do in terms of attracting investment and attention on an underprivileged area of London, an area that desperately needed that investment.  I also think that the vision of Legacy, and it was not just a Legacy for East London but was something Legacy talked about during the bid, was central to the reasons why London won the bid.  It was risky, we were dealing with build-up to the Athens games when there was a lot of scepticism about London being able to pull off a development project of this scale, but I think it was sold successfully to the Olympics committee that we could do this, and that this was an opportunity for a once in a lifetime change for a whole area of a city, not just bringing a spotlight to London, but bringing a spotlight to a part of London that few people ever see.

The Olympic Park Legacy Company was set up in 2009, and it has a huge task: it has to take the great inheritance we get from the Games, the ODA and the organising committee and start turning that into a new piece of city, to make it an engine for what the new Mayor of London has called London’s most important regeneration project for 25 years.  This is a big task.  Bridget referred to Milton Keynes earlier; we are talking about building a development on the scale of a new town in one of the most complex areas of an existing city.  We are talking about wrapping neighbourhoods and some of the everyday life of the city around big, iconic architecture and an extraordinary place that will start to have to mix the ordinary, the surprising as well as the extraordinary.  We will have to do that in an area which will have been closed to the public except for the moment of the Games since 2006.  Therefore, bringing that back into the urban form of London will be the biggest challenge for us, and that is what I will try and focus on today.
London’s move is eastwards at the moment.  Traditionally, the areas downriver, the less privileged parts of the city, are where most of the future capacity for economic growth are.  They are the most diverse areas, and ones which are becoming much better connected with the international railway station of Stratford, with City Airport, with Crossrail coming through as a major piece of west-east infrastructure.  It is an area where growth has been seen in recent years in locations like Canary Wharf, which has grown from being a few sheds to potentially a major commercial centre. 
This is also in the context of London’s growing population.  We are getting back to the levels we had during the Second World War after a dip in the 1970s.  The Olympic Park site, where London’s need and London’s opportunity intersect, is where that eastern growth hits the amazing structure of Lower Lea Valley, as well as the existing structures of Canary Wharf and the Millennium Dome.  Therefore, there is already a lot going on; redevelopment in the Royal Docks, everything happening around Stratford, which I will return to, Crossrail cutting through the Olympic Park site and also going down to the Royal Docks, and new openings that have already taken place, like Westfield. 
Looking at the structure of that valley as it is at the moment, you can see the point that Kay made earlier, the lack of connectivity, the fact that all the heavy infrastructure and industry in this area, has actually cut it off, has actually made it a tear in London’s urban fabric, if you like.  We started in 2003; there was a fairly amazing topography underneath the site with very beautiful, almost Arcadian water spaces in the midst of this very hard-edged industrial land.  There is an incredible diversity of people and uses, and it is an area that is traditionally one of London’s best connected, it is where people tended to move into the city, east from the centre and north from the Docks.  It is one of the youngest areas and one of the most diverse, and, as an area to welcome the world during the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, it has no equal. 
It is also an area that has become host to a great deal of creativity in recent years.  All cities see this process whereby lower value artistic uses tend to be moved out of the city centre, and the areas particularly around Hackney Wick just to the west of the site now have one of the greatest concentrations of artists, architects and entrepreneurs in the creative, cultural and tech industries in the UK.  Therefore, things are arising from the bottom up, from creative industries in this area already, as well as some of the major infrastructure that has come into the area.
I have mentioned the Westfield Centre, which obviously links to King’s Cross and to Paris through the Channel Tunnel rail link connections, the connections to the Docklands light railway, the East London extension; many of these proposals were, if not caused by, at least unlocked by, the London 2012 project.  Regarding the East London line extension, a decision had to be taken as to whether this was something we would definitely do to host the Games, something we might do, or something we would like to do if the Treasury agreed to it.  We managed to get the Treasury to agree to it, so it was part of our bid, and for those of you who have dealt with getting public infrastructure projects funded in the UK or other countries, that can be a major challenge.
Therefore, a lot was happening in Stratford already, and the question that arises is why we needed this big event.  A lot of the development that was taking place was piecemeal, picking up individual sites, quite often building gated and relatively isolated communities, and given the complexities of the site, we needed something that could really pull the land together and could bring the level of investment that was needed to lock this place back into London’s urban form.  This is a difficult challenge, but it was something we thought was worth doing and which could learn from London’s previous experiences.
We often wonder where we can look for successful examples of how to do a legacy, and actually in the past 150 years we do have some good examples, even in the UK.  The 1851 Great Imperial Exhibition, as I think it was called, was the great exhibition held in the Crystal Palace on land just to the south of Hyde Park.  After that the land was taken over by the commission for the exhibition of 1851, which built an unparalleled collection of cultural, museum and educational institutions, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, Imperial College and the Royal Albert Hall.  Those were all the legacy of the 1851 Great Exhibition.  The same thing happened after the 1951 Festival of Britain; the network of incredible institutions and spaces that make up the South Bank Centre were launched through that temporary event.
We have also tried to learn from other London features.  Kay mentioned the tradition of building around parks, and London has some amazing parks.  There is also the private tradition of building really high quality neighbourhoods based around forms of terraced housing with gardens and grouped around squares and green spaces, such as Notting Hill, the Tredagar estate, or many of the others, particularly Victorian and Georgian estates that were built in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. 
Therefore, we are trying to take those inspirations from the past and bring them to bear on the rich inheritance of the site and the rich inheritance of the surrounding areas so that the site can be both changed and coloured by the areas around it but also start to spread change outward, and as I said earlier, making those connections, reconnecting the site to the fabric of East London is a critical part of that. 
Our plans are quite long-term, and we think that it will be 20 or 30 years before all the houses and neighbourhoods we build are occupied.  We have an immediate challenge, from the day the Park reopens, which is the challenge of bringing life into the Park, bringing people there so that they use it and bring it alive, so that it starts to become a visitor destination, because without that presence and use the site will risk becoming desolate very quickly.  Our early focus is on what we can do in the years immediately after 2012 to start bringing people into the site and make it a focus for life, because that is what will create a successful community and the long term value shifts we need for the area.
I went to Athens on a couple of years ago and by mistake found myself down in the Phalero coastal zone, which is one part of their Olympic site, on a beautiful, gorgeously sunny New Year’s day, and the sites were all looked after, but they were also all absolutely desolate, with not a single person there.  Two slightly confused English tourists were wandering around followed by two Securicor vans wondering what the hell we were doing, and that is a terrible warning that we need to put the investment in to get people into the site as quickly as possible after the Games.
Therefore, we have the aquatic centre, Stratford International and the international connection to the Olympic Village, the velodrome, the media and broadcast centre on the west side towards Hackney Wick, the multi-use arena, the stadium, and the red loop of the ArcelorMittal Orbit in the background.  They are all grouped around two parks, the north park and the South plaza.  The north part has an excellent landscape and an incredible river valley, with the river banks renaturalised to make it a softeredged environment.  It will be an area for recreation and for peace and quiet, and more for cultural activities, whereas the south park is much harder edged, it has the big elements there, the aquatic centre, the Orbit and the stadium.  It is much more of a plaza for major events, major entertainment activities and sporting uses.  Therefore, there is a contrast between these two parks and their characters. 
Regarding the south part, we are looking at how we can bring in visitor attractions to complement the Orbit so that you do not just come and use the Orbit or see the stadium and go away, but rather that the Olympic Park is somewhere you could come to spend a day, have something to eat, let your children play in the fountain, have a go on some other rides and attractions, so it becomes a destination that attracts people in.  It is also complemented by a whole range of programmes to maintain the level of interest.  One of our tests has been what will bring people there, not just on a nice summer day as you always see in architect’s drawings but on an afternoon like this, a bit cold and wet, a bit English, to be honest.  We are trying to find that mix of activities and entertainments that will bring people there, everything from community to commercial events, from big programmed festivals and events in tents to things that are more spontaneous, things that surprise, like some of the activities that have been going on in Trafalgar Square in recent days, where an artificial sun has been rising and falling in the darkest days of the year.  We are trying to bring some of that sense of excitement to the Olympic Park.
That is our first task.  Our longer term task is to start building communities that work around that lively core of the Park, and I will now move from the transformation plans and what we inherit to what we hope to build out over a 20-30 year period.  I will say two things about that build-out now.   One is that we are making plans for 20 years, which at one level is a completely absurd thing to do, but we need to look 20 years ahead to get a clear planning framework for what we want to do, and to set some financial parameters, but we are also discussing with the planning authorities how to allow for the things we are not expecting, the surprises. 
The other thing is that this will become, needs to become, very much a private-public partnership in coming years.  The public sector has invested hugely in the infrastructure; there is a small investment in this current period to transform after the Games, but the long term investment will require private development and partnerships between investors and developers in every phase of the project. 
Regarding the Park in 2030, we are continuing the form of the Olympic Games by keeping the Park in the middle and growing new communities around the edge.  You can see to the north of the athletes’ village, to the side of the impressive broadcast centre, to the south, and then down south of the Orbit and north of the aquatic centre, we are building long term redevelopment in some of those temporary locations, and one effect of that will be to preserve the Park and to preserve that extraordinary place in the middle of the Park.  The other is to make sure that we are not starting to create alternative centres of gravity.  We want the centre of the Olympic Park to be the centre of the surrounding area.  We want Hackney Wick to survive and thrive as an area.  There is clearly a huge critical mass within Strafford City and Stratford town centre.  We want Layton to remain as a district centre.  Therefore, this is an area that should grow in from the outside as well as out from the inside.
Looking at the character of the different areas, Stratford waterfront is the area right next to Stratford City, and it is probably the most high density development we are proposing, with the greatest intensity of commercial use, particularly along the riverside and by the aquatic centre.  It will be the gateway to the Park, the first area you come to when you come from Westfield and Stratford City.  The area around the press and broadcast centre will be a more mixed use area; this is the area of our other major employment focus, with several thousand jobs in the legacy of the press and broadcast centre, and we are short-listing people to reuse those at the moment.  However, we will mix those in with some housing and get some of the feel of Hackney Wick on the other side of the river so we make the most of the critical mass of cultural industries there.
Moving south, the area that used to be called Old Ford is now called Sweetwater.  This is probably one of the quietest areas of the Park, sitting between the stadium and the communities of Fish Island, with canal side living grouped alongside the water, probably a predominantly residential area, and one of our main schools was built there.  The more mixed industrial and commercial area is to the south of the Park around Pudding Mill Lane, to the south of the rail corridor.
Therefore, those are our future phases.  The first phase is Chobham Manor just to the north of the athletes’ village, and we are trying to do something to complement it while being quite different, trying to focus much more on family housing with front doors, perhaps fewer elements of flat development.  The athletes’ village will clearly offer some high quality apartment dwelling for the next 3-4 years after the Games, so we are selecting developers to build something on different scale that starts to blend in with the residential communities of Layton just to the east.
Our development will only be part of the change in the area, and that informs some of the institutional changes coming forward in the present time.  We are currently proposing around 6,700 housing units within our current planning application, and we think there will be a total capacity of around 8,000, but there will be 2-3 times that emerging in the surrounding area over time.  A lot of those are already in the pipeline, along Stratford high street, for example, and a lot of those will be coming forward in future years.  Therefore, the Park should only be seen as a part of a much bigger process of change within the area around Stratford, Hackney and Tower Hamlets, and it needs to catalyse and inform that change, though we are only one part of that story. 
We are only one part of that story in another sense as well.  The Games always started with the concept that they would make a difference to what was not just one of the poorest areas of London but of the UK as well.  The boroughs have worked with the Government to come up with what they see as the challenge of convergence.  It is a simple idea, that there is an imbalance in London, in its socioeconomic life chance.  The aim is that, through the Games and through associated initiatives, people should have the same life chances in this part of London as they do in London as a whole.  We cannot have everyone being the average, obviously, but the aim is to start to redress that balance so that this part of London comes up to the London average, which does not seem too ambitious. 
We are also working with local authorities and other agencies to try and maximise our impact there.  I will not run through all the programmes we are doing in detail, but we are trying to connect with those communities in the surrounding area through a youth panel and projects with local charities so that people start to build the connection and to feel that it is their park when it reopens.
We are also making the physical connections through the physical infrastructure we build connecting with the surrounding neighbourhoods.  We are changing; the Legacy Company is being reformed as a mayoral development corporation from this April.  This will make us part of the Mayor of London’s machinery, which will give us a simpler and more unequivocal accountability, but will also create new powers to create new planning policy in the area and give planning consent, making us a very powerful but supportive partner in local regeneration.  Our programme is to start our mobilisation onsite as the Games finish, and then start reopening from 2013 onwards with the programming and programme development we have shown.
When we started in 2003, the site had industrial uses, old railway yards and factories.  During the Games, we will have an extraordinary concourse in the centre of the site, we will have the stadiums.  Regarding where we hope to get in the long term, you will no longer see the boundaries of the Olympic Park anymore; you will see the venues and the parkland, but the rest of it will have connected into East London.