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Olympic Hyde Park of the East
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17 March 2008
Games chiefs have drawn up a blueprint for a £200 million project to convert the area near Stratford into vast green space the size of Hyde Park.
After the Games, which is expected to attract four million visitors, acres of asphalt will be torn up to make way for meadows, wetlands, lawns as well as a "concert field" for 50,000 spectators.
Further details of how the former low-rent industrial area near Stratford will be converted will emerge later this week when the London Development Agency publishes an early draft of its "legacy masterplan".
"It will characterise east London and give the area an equal weight to the west," said George Hargreaves, an American architect hired to design the park.
The park, the biggest urban regeneration project in Europe, is two-and-a-half-miles long and runs through the Lower Lea Valley. It will contain a 120-metre wind turbine which will be surrounded by orchards and vegetable patches designed to encourage local food production.
The area will be fringed by thousands of offices and homes intended to be built to help the park pay its way after the Games. This includes the athletes' village which will be converted into 4,000 homes by 2014 and overlook a new landscape.
A "one-planet pavilion" will be set among orchards, allotments and nut groves and will demonstrate ways of living a low-energy lifestyle.
On the other side of the park a miniature biomass station will show how local energy sources can be used to cut carbon emissions. Designers are planning to build a network of fitness trails and outdoor gyms with equipment embedded in the landscape. This is intended to encourage active lifestyles in the area.
Other community sports facilities include a cricket pitch, mountain bike trails, horseriding and a 10-acre grassland for football.
Mr Hargreaves said: "We plan to create another world with wetland habitats and broad expanses of meadows in the centre of east London. This will be one of the great parks of London. I want it to be a park which gives a memory of hosting the Games."
Several of the Olympic venues will stay. The Olympic stadium will be scaled down after 2012 from 80,000 to 25,000 seats, the aquatics centre will be similarly reduced. There will also be a "Velopark" to be used by track cyclists and BMX riders.
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