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Olympic Hyde Park of the East
Matthew Beard, Evening Standard17.03.08
Details of a 270-acre urban park to be created on the site of the London Olympics have emerged.
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.
Reader views (5)
The "artist's impression" does not include the tagging, graffiti, plastic bags in trees, hoods hanging around corners harassing passers-by, council blocks in the distance etc. I would not want to be that stunt-cyclist in Impression 3...
- Dave, Muswell Hill, London
Surely we need housing for all the immigrates, they can't all be expected camp in this new park.
- Ben, London
I've heard all these whingeing arguments before, about the Sydney Olympics. Just wait - the excitement, pride and sheer joy of the games in your home town will be worth all of it.
- Jacobh, Sydney, Australia
Is this being promoted as a benefit?
I don't know if the planners have noticed, but not only just to the north-east is there Victoria Park, the first & still one of the finest parks in London, but Stratford is only a few minutes from the southern edge of Epping Forest. At up to 4 miles wide & about 20 long with dozens of lakes & ponds & thousands of acres of grass & woodland, Hyde Park could be dropped into the Forest without anyone noticing.
- P Johns, london england
I for one am ecstatic that I will spend the next 20 years trying to pay for an Olympic games site that seems to haemorrhage money exponentially month on month. That's because at the end of it all I know that Stratford will be a much nicer place to live, which will really improve the lives of us South West Londoners.
- Ken Sabuffoon, Wimbledon
