Fun after the Games: Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

Kieran Long
5 Oct 2011

The Olympic Park Legacy Company submits its planning application today for the 20-year transformation of the Olympic site in Stratford into five new neighbourhoods around the edges of what from 2013 will be known as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

The Mayor has billed it "the most important regeneration project that the city has seen in 25 years", it compares in size to the biggest regeneration projects in London in recent years (Brent Cross/Cricklewood, for instance), and the eyes of London are on it. We have been told by politicians of all persuasions that this Olympics should be judged by what it leaves behind, and this is the plan that sets out what that legacy will be.

The 5,000-page application outlines up to 8,000 new homes (in addition to the 2,800 in the already built Athletes' Village) and "employment space" for 4,400 by 2031 in five residential districts which will be slotted between the four Olympic venues that will remain (the Stadium, Aquatics Centre, multi-use sports venue and the Velodrome).

There are also proposals for nine nurseries, three health centres, three schools and another dozen as yet unspecified community buildings. Over the next 20 years, a whole new piece of city will take shape, and the OPLC hopes it will be a mixed one: 35 per cent of the housing will be "affordable" and 40 per cent are family homes, many of them terraced houses.

The timing is impressive - nearly a year ahead of the Games we have a plan in place. The people of Sydney, Athens or Beijing, where the Olympic aftermath was little considered and much Olympic land still lies fallow, are surely envious.

Today's application is just the outline of the plan. It sets out the street pattern and the approximate sizes and shapes of buildings, as well as detailing the mixture of housing, commercial and public buildings. Once this is given permission, the OPLC will seek developers to build each neighbourhood, and the details of individual buildings will be drawn up.

The OPLC hopes to have the developer for the first of the neighbourhoods - so-called Chobham Manor, consisting of 960 family homes between the Athletes' Village and the Velodrome - in place before the Games. This will be followed by East Wick, the area opposite Hackney Wick on the west side of the Park, and later by the neighbourhoods around the Park's South Plaza, an expansive public space, and the southernmost reaches near Bromley-by-Bow.

It's the work of a lifetime for many of the people involved, and I attended an exclusive briefing last week at OPLC headquarters in Stratford in the hope of understanding the legacy vision. The OPLC is a not-for-profit, public- sector organisation and has made its home in a glassy office building in Stratford town centre, where it overlooks many of the problems it will need to solve.

The most obvious of these will be clear to anyone who has visited the gargantuan shopping mall that Westfield opened last month on the edge of the Olympic Park. That development feels emphatically separate from the town centre, accessible only by drawbridge from Stratford Tube. The OPLC is squarely aiming at preventing this kind of sense of division from the rest of east London in future development.

Duncan Innes, executive director of the OPLC, says the three key themes of the legacy plan are "family houses, connectivity and quality open space". Pragmatic, if uninspiring words. Given the scope and scale of the planning application, pragmatic is probably the sensible approach, but there is little sense of a greater vision for the masterplan than solving these problems.

The plan was presented to me by Canadian architect Kathryn Firth, chief of design for the OPLC, whose track record is with commercial architects KPF and PLP. These are the kinds of architects who can get things done but have demonstrated little understanding in the past of what makes a London street special.

To be fair to Firth, she was battling a terrible cold as she presented the plans, but even so, listening to her was like playing regeneration bingo. I waited patiently for the slide demonstrating how "vibrant" the East End is, and it duly appeared: cheerful stalls from Columbia Road flower market showing how "buzzy" (her word) she would like the Olympic Park to be.

She showed the hackneyed Abercrombie Map of London from 1943, showing how London is a "series of villages", an insight so clichéd that any Londoner might find it insufficient to describe their home town.

However, there are no high streets in the legacy plan, and few obviously intimate places for a Columbia Road-style flower market. The main public space is the South Plaza, a 55-acre "island" between the Stadium and the wavy-roofed Aquatics Centre, and this is earmarked for music festivals and other large-scale events. The nearest thing I could see to a London street on the plan is in East Wick, where a school, workplaces, flats and the Multi-Use Arena take their place on what could be a really nice thoroughfare.

But the foundation for the masterplan is not, it seems, London street life. The way Firth presents it, it seems to be about creating vistas and views of the Olympic landmarks across the Park. The OPLC has worked hard to ensure new buildings leave uninterrupted views between Westfield and the Stadium, and south across the Park from the Velodrome. The imagery gets into unintentionally hilarious territory when you see the view down one of the streets in the new Marshgate Wharf neighbourhood, with the red metal contortion of Anish Kapoor's ArcelorMittal Orbit tower looming like an alien invader over standard-looking blocks of apartments.

Architects who work for practices such as Firth's are often obsessed with these visual moments but rarely realise that these are secondary in all of the best bits of London. Even St Paul's Cathedral doesn't have an axial street in front of it providing an uninterrupted view. This is a way of planning that subordinates public life and character to what tourists would like to see when they arrive for a day trip.

It seems the OPLC has no idea what the Olympic Park could be, apart from a leisure landscape for visitors and a recreation space for families. The plan reveals no deeper significance.

Firth makes the comparison between the park and the South Bank but the comparison is salutary. The Royal Festival Hall and the buildings around it were symbolic of a common enterprise, they had the role of cheering a war-battered population, and were built to help us believe in a common, optimistic future. Abercrombie's post-war reconstruction plan for London, which was quoted by Firth in her presentation, talks about "local loyalty and neighbourliness, that hold a good people together, because they have the same interests and pleasures, and because they share their troubles and their triumphs". It is hard to imagine that anyone at the OPLC could characterise their work in such a poetic and optimistic way.

The plan submitted today prioritises family life (in contrast to most regeneration plans of recent years, which focused on single-bed accommodation), and gives us another pleasant neighbourhood in which to while away some leisure hours. Its desire to connect with the surrounding city is laudable but still it's possible to long for the days when architects considered something more profound than transport connections and real estate mix. We've certainly had too much hubris in regeneration in the past but a thought for civic life should not be beyond a great city such as ours.