Land of hope and glory

Rowan Moore
16 Jan 2009

The Olympic park is at the heart of the London Olympics. Along with the Aquatic centre it will be the most tangible legacy once the ­stadium has been shrunk and the temporary venues removed.

Plans for creating new neighbourhoods — the long-promised regeneration that 2012 is supposed to bring — will depend on the park's ability to make the area desirable.

It is also one piece of the physical infrastructure where London can do better than Beijing. With London's smaller budgets we can't match the extravagance of the Bird's Nest ­stadium, but in Beijing the huge spaces between the structures were bleak parade grounds. The park could ­actually be pleasant for the spectators.

At 250 acres the area is about the size of St James's Park and is billed as “the largest urban park created in Europe for 150 years”. The southern part, where the main Olympic facilities are concentrated, will continue to be a place of sporting and other activities after the Games. The northern part will be a quieter, more contemplative place.

The park's greatest asset is water, provided by the River Lea and by the channels feeding off it. The San Francisco-based landscape architect George Hargreaves is proposing to exploit these allowing canals and channels to spread into pools and reedbeds. Hargreaves has designed parks all over the world, including the landscaping for the ­Sydney Olympics and for Bill Clinton's Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Conscious of the need to ­create a place specific to London, he is planning native species of tree such as oak and hawthorn, and re-using industrial materials to evoke the industrial heritage of the area.

He is planning gardens inspired by English traditions of plant collecting, in a half-mile long strip that will be realised by the 28-year-old garden designer Sarah Price. Hargreaves is also promising sustainability and biodiversity: new habitats that will attract frogs, insects, birds and mammals that have long disappeared from this area, such as kingfishers and otters.

The waterways and changes of level require more than 30 bridges to allow people to move around. Most, designed by Allies and Morrison architects, carry the ground over in such a way that you will hardly notice when you're on them. One, a piece of overlapping tagliatelle by Heneghan Peng Architects, will be one of the icons of the Games.

The park's greatest challenge will be attracting large numbers of visitors after the Games are over. If it does not, it will become an expensive liability. If it does, it will be hailed as one of the greatest achievements of the London Olympics.