It takes years for the city to digest the changes that the Olympics leave. London hosted the Olympics in 2012. What happened now that the games, the crowds and media are just memories?
When London won its Olympic bid in 2005, then-mayor Ken Livingstone’s big idea was not about sport but ‘to get the billions of pounds out of the government to develop the East End’. In 1889 London had relegated industry east to the Lower Lee Valley, so that smoke would blow away from the centre and middle classes. The river Lee was re-engineered for industrial access with new navigation channels creating a chain of islands. This is where the 2.5 km2 Olympic Park was located. Some industry had survived there, but much was wasteland, and the whole site was heavily contaminated with petrochemicals, heavy metals and thorium. In Stratford on the Park’s east side were railway yards, sociaI deprivation and a failing shopping centre sometimes used as an open toilet by the homeless.
London’s Olympics were planned to leave ‘legacy’, both physical and social. The area would inherit a string of iconic sports venues and other buildings, London’s biggest new park in a century, and much-needed new housing. New public transport links would make adjacent Stratford hyper-connected (even trains to France would stop there), driving development. Sport, wellbeing and biodiversity would thrive in the park, and economic prosperity around it.
How did things turn out? The River Lea has become a tranquil channel where nature thrives. Now called Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the Olympics site is scattered with architectural landmarks. At its southern end, the lightweight Olympic Stadium was designed by HOK (now Populous) to have its 80,000 seated capacity reduced, and it is now called the London Stadium, seats 62,500 and is home of football club West Ham United. Nearby, Zaha Hadid’s curvaceous Aquatics Centre is in full use by public and professionals, as is another spectacular venue with a double-curvature roof, the Hopkins Architects-designed Velodrome, in the north of the park.
Although it has launched many on epic high-velocity trajectories, the most prominent legacy building never hosted any Olympic sport. A late addition to the Olympic plan was seen as a vanity project for Boris Johnson, who had followed Livingstone as London’s mayor. Johnson wanted something at least 100m tall. What London got is a mad structure called the ArcelorMittal Orbit, situated near the Stadium. British-Sri Lankan designer Cecil Balmond and British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor collaborated to create a steel tower where curving trusses spiral up around the core and loop as high as 114m over a public rotunda. London now has several higher panoramic platforms but there’s nothing else like the 178m-long slide added in 2016, designed by Carsten Höller. The Orbit needs maintenance but it will be back this summer (2024).
Yet more legacy architecture stands on the Olympic Park’s western side. The 275m-long, plain modernist box built as the Media Centre was repurposed in 2019 by Hawkins\Brown as Here East, hosting multimedia hi-tech businesses. Red balconies and yellow pipes jazz up its facades, just like classical Richard Rogers-style high-tech. Nearby is one of two John McAslan + Partners-designed corten-steel clad Energy Centres (2011) which originally powered the Olympics. With its signature profile made by a 42m-high flue tower and sloping bridge to a biomass boiler in a heritage warehouse, it has a powerful, timeless industrial aesthetic.
Across the park on the edge of Stratford, the Athlete’s Village offered temporary accommodation to 17,000 athletes in a landscaped grid of 69 blocks up to 12 stories high. They were adapted as apartments and became the East Village, which has since expanded with the Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands-designed Victory Plaza (2019). It has apartment towers of 32 and 35 storeys, heights reached by other new apartment towers in Stratford. But like anywhere, high-rise lifestyle development is simply not solving the housing crisis. Livingstone had pledged that half of new homes would be affordable. 30-40,000 homes were promised on the Olympic site, but just 13,000 have been built, and almost all are beyond the reach of the indigenous community. Meanwhile, local borough Newham had 32,000 households on its housing waiting list in 2022, but could supply only 600 new homes annually. What if the Athlete’s Village living spaces had not been de-partitioned? That would have left more, but smaller, homes. Is it too radical to drastically re-calibrate how many square metres we really need for city living? Especially young, single people? I’ve raised that question before (add link 2).
More landmarks have come to the Olympic’s eastern edge which extend Stratford’s dense, animated new urban citadel.
The new Gang of Four at East Bank – V&A East ( designed by O’Donnell+Tuomey), ual London College of Fashion (Allies and Morrison) BBC Music Studios (Flanagan Lawrence), Sadler’s Wells East (O’Donnell+Tuomey). Photo Herbert Wright
Beside the East Village, trains to Paris don’t stop at the high-speed train platforms, but Stratford has the UK’s busiest rail station outside the central London termini. Public transport delivers vast crowds to Westfield, London’s second largest shopping centre. Stratford is booming. Its next transformation is to be a cultural and academic hub. A new generation of big buildings are far more massive and solid than the Olympic venues. They are sited in the Olympic Park’s new East Bank Quarter, reached by a short walk through a Westfield pedestrian boulevard. Adjacent to the Aquatic Centre, four world-class institutions line up on the old riverside – a sculptural Victoria & Albert Museum outpost, the relocated London College of Fashion, BBC Music Studios and a second building for dance academy Sadler’s Wells. Their new citadels vary in form and facade. Some are already open to students, all will soon open to the public, and all aim to integrate local community involvement. The East Bank continues on the other side of the old river. Opposite them, a monolithic concrete structure now rises next to the Orbit. This is the Stanton Williams-designed Marshgate UCL East, an outpost of University College London (rated top ten in the world’s universities). The 35,000 m2 inter-faculty research building is sculpted around a cathedral-scaled atrium. Incredibly, it is just the first of four UCL buildings in a masterplan for a campus of 180,000 m2.
The original vision seems to have worked. But city life isn’t always planned. Older urban quarters usually emerged without the vast investments that fire up new commercial, consumerist and luxury living bonanzas. Urban villages develop chaotically and with a human scale. Hackney Wick, on the western side of the navigation waterway, is a total contrast to its neighbour, the Olympic Park. Old warehouses, derelict pubs and houseboat moorings were colonised by artists and artisans well before the Olympics. The Wick became a bohemian urban village animated by rebellious street art, makeshift workspaces and social hang-outs, like an echo of Berlin when it was ‘poor but sexy’. Despite residential developers moving in, that vibe lives on and is infiltrating into the Park. Pop-up eateries line the water by the Energy Centre. Nearby is the Turner.Works-designed Hackney Bridge hub (2020), where bars, restaurants, markets and workspaces thrive beside courtyards, terraces and angular nooks. This is ‘meanwhile’ architecture, there for just 12 years until a residential project starts.
Paris in 2024, like London in 2012, has regeneration, sustainability, green space and accessibility built into its Olympic plans. Hopefully it will do better than London on affordable housing. But London has a strong message for the post-Olympic city anywhere. Planners and architects may deliver sanitised, curated versions of the urban life, but they struggle to create the vibrant edginess of places like Hackney Wick. They should give space for the unplanned and unexpected to grow.
London, April 2024. Words © Herbert Wright
(Adapted from my column in Chroniques d’architecture and published as https://chroniques-architecture.com/londres-12-ans-plus-tard-les-athletes-une-fois-partis/)
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