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Greenwich Park boasts a row of chestnut trees that were young at the time of the Great Fire, and 130 years old during the French Revolution. As the sun shone yesterday, courting couples of the iPod age lay beneath the same branches that sheltered King Charles II and his mistresses.
The sweet chestnuts are among London's oldest living things, surviving wars, the fall of empires, and the rise of the vast city. Now they, and their magnificent park, face a new challenge.
In 2012, Greenwich Park is due to host the equestrian competition at the London Olympics which will, the Evening Standard can reveal, result in its partial closure for 10 months and the "pruning" of some historic trees. Holding the events in this unique place was one of the London bid's most eye-catching promises. For the Games organisers - and the British Equestrian Federation, the official governing body of Olympic horse sport - it takes equestrianism to a new level of excitement and media profile. "It will be a stunning backdrop," says Sue Benson, designer of the cross-country course. "Can you imagine the pictures?"
And it brings one of Britain's more successful Olympic sports, into the heart of the Games, with the park only a few miles from the main Olympic site. At the Beijing Olympics, the horse events are 1,000 miles away, in Hong Kong. At the Melbourne Games, the equestrian competition took place in Stockholm, a different hemisphere.
But a growing body of opponents, some in the riding world, say the choice of Greenwich Park will seriously damage both the venue and the sport it seeks to celebrate. "It just doesn't fit. The park is too damned small," says Pippa Cuckson, former deputy editor of Horse and Hound magazine and communications director for Great Leighs racecourse, a potential alternative to Greenwich for the cross-country event. "My concern is that the sporting tests will be compromised, and it will make a fool of the sport."
"If I hear the words 'iconic site' again, I'll scream," says Michael Goldman, a local resident who has used £1,000 of his ownto start a local pressure group, No to Greenwich Olympic Equestrian Events (Nogoe). "It doesn't make sense to have such an event in an urban park and it has the potential to do real harm."
The stakes could scarcely be higher. For its combination of dramatic, hilly landscape and long history, Greenwich Park, first enclosed in 1433, is arguably the most important city park in Britain, certainly the only one that is also a Unesco World Heritage Site. It includes many other centuries-old trees, the observatory, the meridian line, ancient f lower and herb gardens, Roman remains, a deer park, 70 species of birds and 14 species of butterfly. It is perhaps the most important single part of a Greenwich tourist experience that draws in 9.6 million visitors a year, spending £532 million and directly supporting 8,300 local jobs.
In any other case touching such a place would almost certainly be impossible; under draft government planning guidance, even people living near a World Heritage Site will be prevented from making more than minor external alterations to their homes.
WHAT is planned for the Olympics will be wholesale, if temporary, change, revealed here in detail for the first time. A 23,000-seat showjumping arena, 550ft by 525ft, will be built on the lawn between the Maritime Museum and the observatory. (The original plan, to build the arena in the grounds of the museum rather than the park itself, has been scrapped: it would have required the lengthy closure of a main road.)
Dozens of stables and a number of warm-up tracks, along with facilities, will go up between the arena and the western, Crooms Hill side. Most controversially, a 6.2km (3.9 mile) crosscountry horseriding course will snake through almost every corner.
The locals' first concern is for how long they will lose their park. Olympics organisers say work on the arena, stables and ancillary buildings is likely to closemost of the lower park for seven to eight months over the spring and summer of 2012. "We anticipate starting major building works in March 2012 and will hand back the park about six weeks after the end of the Paralympics," says Debbie Jevans, London 2012's director of sport. The Paralympics end on September 4.
There will be closures of similar areas for "two to three months" in spring and summer 2011, as smaller versions of the facilities (an arena without tiered seating, for instance, and only 30 stables) are built for the test event that the IOC requires. Ms Jevans said work to prepare the cross-country course will start "about two years before, in 2010" but only small areas will be required at any one time.
Most of the upper half of the park, including the observatory and parts of the lower eastern end, will remain open most of the time. Organisers said " minimal" complete closures would amount to "certainly not months, possibly not even weeks". But the closures seem likely to damage the 2011 and 2012 tourist seasons, since the areas affected are the busiest parts of the park, closest to Greenwich town centre. The total area facing prolonged closure amounts to between a quarter and a third of the park.
Opponents' second area of concern is whether all the changes will, indeed, be temporary. The organisers say they will hand the park back undamaged. After initially pledging to protect only trees of "ecological or heritage importance", they have now told the Standard that they will not destroy any tree.
The arena will be built in the park's only really substantial expanse of open grass and measurements taken by the Standard suggest it will fit. The ground is not flat. Ms Jevans said it would be raised, on some form of artificial platform, rather than levelled. The area of the stables and warm-up tracks, sprinkled with mature trees, is more problematic but Ms Jevans said that the buildings would, if necessary, be "built around the trees".
The most sensitive issue of all is the cross-country course. At many Olympics, including this year's, the cross-country is on a separate site from the showjumping and dressage arena, simply because it needs so much more space. Hong Kong's cross-country event will be held at a golf course and country club miles out in the semi-rural New Territories. Sydney's cross-country venue was 1.6km by 1.8km, twice the size of Greenwich. The BEF says London will be the first time in Olympic history that the equestrian crosscountry has been held in a built-up area.
"To build a cross-country course you import a mixture of topsoil and sand and put grass seed on top," says Dane Rawlins, show director of dressage at Hickstead and an opponent of using Greenwich Park. "You will have to rotovate the ground to get [the seed] to bite into the new soil." The park's tarmac paths will also need to be dug out where they cross the course, he said, to avoid damaging the horses' hooves.
The course plan seen by the Standard only skirts the Charles II chestnuts but it will make five crossings of avenues and paths lined on both sides by closelyspaced and sometimes almost equally venerable trees. Hong Kong's crosscountry course is 10 metres wide - the Olympic standard. If that was applied in Greenwich, trees would have to go. Ms Jevans said the course could narrow to five metres to get through the tree lines. "Why don't they go the whole hog and have a one-metre course run with Shetland ponies," scoffs Rawlins.
Jill Butler, of the Woodland Trust, says the Olympics could damage the park without actually meaning to. British Standards guidance recommends against any kind of construction, even tracks or paths, within up to 15 metres of a veteran tree. "The majority of roots are in the top 30 centimetres of the soil," she said. "Lots of horses going across them could cause significant change, and the older the tree, the less it may be able to respond."
The other difficulty with many of the trees is that even if their trunks are more than five metres apart, their branches are too low for a horse and rider to pass beneath. Ms Jevans admitted some "pruning" would be needed With an old tree, according to Jill Butler, that is a potentially lethal operation.
"Cutting back of lower branches should be avoided or minimised in mature trees if at all possible," she said. "Because they are the biggest branches, you are making a major change to the trunk of the tree. You're allowing air in and speeding up the process of decay such that the tree may not be able to outgrow the decay.
"These are very significant trees, and if you damage them it's not like a building. There's nothing you can do to put them back together."
Officially, Greenwich's Olympic status is now set in stone, with the local MP and council firmly in support. Even the local amenity societies are adopting a waitandsee approach. But a peasants' revolt to move at least the cross-country appears to be gathering pace, with reluctant society officers being pressurised at special meetings by angry ordinary members.
BEF spokespeople did not return the Standard's calls but a statement on its website says it is "very happy" with Greenwich as a venue. Pippa Cuckson and Dane Rawlins have been accused of having vested interests in moving the cross-country, which they strongly deny.
"I am not flagging [Great Leighs] up as an alternative," says Cuckson. "The fact is there just isn't enough room at Greenwich to put in what's required. Nor will there be room for the spectators. Badminton [the main UK cross-country event] had 180,000 spectators and Greenwich will have room for far fewer. By having it there, we are denying the whole home crowd of three-day eventing the chance to see the competition."
At a recent Standard debate, Olympics chief Lord Coe said having the equestrianism at Greenwich would open up the sport to new inner-city audiences. The blunt truth is that Greenwich will shut out not just potential new followers of equestrianism but also many of the people who already watch.
Reader views (8)
Why not have these events in Windsor? The Royal Horse Show occurs every year and demonstrates the easy accessibility of Windsor from London (40 mins from Waterloo). The Great Park has room for all the facilities and parking required and has the 'iconic' backdrop of Windsor Castle - what more does the Olympics need?
- N Percy, Slough UK
The obvious place to have the equestrian Cross country is on the unused MOD land on the South side of Woolwich barracks, between the military buildings and Shooters Hill Road. This is still within the LB of Greenwich.
- Alan Harding, London
It does indeed seem obvious that Greenwich Park is the wrong place for the equestrian events, for all the reasons explained in Andrew Gilligan's excellent article. The recent Extraordinary General Meeting of the Friends of Greenwich Park voted overwhelmingly against having the cross-country events in Greenwich.
The idea of putting it there must have been just a political stunt, not thought through.
A proper cost / benefit analysis is now urgently needed comparing Greenwich with some alternatives - one being somewhere where there are already good equestrian facilities (Hickstead say, or Badminton), and another being an area in need of renovation (perhaps somewhere near the Olympic village). These sites should be compared with Greenwich against objective criteria:
> What would be the financial cost in each place?
> How many people would be able to attend the event in person?
> Would there be any difference in the numbers watching on TV and on advertising revenues?
> Where would the course and facilities be best for the competitors?
> Where would the traffic congestion be worst?
> What would be the effects on the local environment while the site is being prepared and the events held(including the practices and the paralympics as well as the main events)
> And most important, where would there be a positive legacy for the sport or for the local people?
The result would show that Greenwich would be the worst alternative in every respect.
- Dermot Glynn, london
If anyone read the Racing Post yesterday, they would soon work out why the Great Leighs Racecourse would not be be an alternative to Greenwich, even though it is closest of all to East London and by all accounts thee times the size. Yesterday it was reported that on September 27 Great Leighs is staging the first ever European trials for the world's most valuable and important horse racing event - the Breeders Cup in the USA. If this became an annual event, as racing insiders appears to expect, there's no way the British Horse-racing Authority would allow it to host a distraction like an Olympic cross country event just a few weeks beforehand.
- Peter Richarrds, Reigate, Surrey
Thanks Andrew Gilligan for the article highlighting the problems in using Greenwich Park for the 2012 Equestrian events. My opinion is that the park will be ruined as a result. No local people who have studied the plans and care about the park believe the glib comments from Lord Coe and others about 'minimal disruption' and 'speedy return afterwards without lasting damage'. Readers should not be fooled by the views of the local council who support the use of Greenwich Park - they want the kudos of claiming they have 'won' the equestrian events for the borough's 'Iconic Site'. It is not too late for common-sense to prevail. I say move the entire event elsewhere (Windsor, Badminton or Hickstead). Those who continue to support holding the equestrian events in Greenwich Park should come and visit to see for themselves how unsuitable it will be. Unesco World Heritage Site indeed!
- Mike Hamson, London UK
I am a horse fan but I don't see the need to hold the equestrian events in Greenwich Park. It's too small - and the roads around couldn't take the horse boxes and other equipment. Epping Forest or out in Kent would be better. We do also have other suitable areas in the South-East that are just as prestigious - how about Blenheim Palace, or even Windsor Great Park?
- K John, London, UK
I am an American who likes to visit London at least once a year. Every time I go my first place to visit is Greenwich. I knew about the events to be held in the park for 2012, and thus, had planned not to visit during the games. Now too find out of closures for parts of 2010, 2011, and many months of 2012, it comes as a big disappointment. I would hate to see Greenwich lose another iconic landmark since the horrible fire on the Cutty Sark.
Event organizers must think of the impact on the site and on the millions of pounds in possible losses from tourist who won't want to venture into an post Olympic "farce" of Greenwich park.
- Mark Moscoe, Texas, USA
Sebastian Coe has to wake up and realise that possibly a majority of Londoners are not interested in the Olympics being held in London 2012. Traffic jams, disruption to public transport, price rises and lack of accommodation are not helpful to those that will need to get to work while this event takes place.
It is bad enough that we are being asked to subsidise them. Having a treasure such as Greenwich Park ruined for the sake of three days in 2012 is a price too far and must be stopped at all costs before it is too late.
- Harry Henderson, London
