Tonight:
4°c
Good for walking the dog but lacking in any drama
Rowan Moore, Architecture Critic6 Nov 2008
London 2012 will be the safety-first Olympics and this will be its safety-first park.
During the Games it promises to be more pleasant than the daunting parade grounds that Beijing offered. Afterwards it will be a nice enough place to walk the dog. But it looks very normal.
It looks professional and competent in the manner of the parks landscape architect George Hargreaves has designed in Dallas and Sydney and Arkansas. It will offer biodiversity and sustainability. Frogs and butterflies and four-legged mammals long absent from these parts are expected to reappear.
This is all fine and dandy and something to be grateful for. But it still feels as if something has been lost since the early days of the Olympic project, when we were offered tantalising glimpses of a landscape that created drama out of the multiple levels that already exist on the site.
The Olympics are an extraordinary project and the Lower Lea Valley is an extraordinary place, but the park proposals look generic, and much like the Hargreaves parks in other cities. There are nods to locality - the flower gardens inspired by English traditions of plant collecting, and re-used industrial materials - but the design does not seem inspired by the spirit of the place.
The park will face some challenges if it is to flourish after 2012. It is squeezed between great slabs of land earmarked for future development, which will lie empty for years before they are redeveloped. Its connections with existing neighbourhoods are indirect. It will take creative effort to attract people there. Above all it should not be ringed with sterile hoardings while we're waiting for regeneration to turn up.
It will also require proper management and upkeep, if it is not to become tatty and neglected. How this is done and by whom, and with what money, has not yet been decided, but we are promised that it will be sorted out in good time.
