A majestic and even bigger park: now that really is a 2012 legacy

Rowan Moore
16.01.09

As we hit the halfway point between winning the Olympic bid and the opening of the Games, the afterlife of 2012 becomes still more pressing. Everybody knows this, which is why the Mayor is appointing a legacy tsar - but we still don't know much about what this legacy will be.

In particular, we don't know what will happen in the long period of transition between the end of the Games and the creation of new neighbourhoods that are set to sprout around it. Up to 10,000 homes are planned, its residents drawn by the glades and waterfalls of the Olympic park.

Just as the Prince Regent and his architect John Nash achieved with Regent's Park 200 years ago, it is hoped that greenery and real estate will flourish together: the park raises the value of the development around it, which in turn helps support the park. It will also be a happy marriage of government investment in 2012 and free-market property speculation.

But what if it doesn't work out like this? What if the private sector, still hobbled by rash investments of the past, is slow in arriving at the altar? What if there are no latterday equivalents of Nash's composite columns and stuccoed colonnades but rather hoardings wrapping tracts of nothing, adorned with fraying posters advertising with anxious optimism regeneration that has not yet arrived?

Then stolen Tesco trolleys and hooded gangs will stalk the land. Graffiti will besmirch the well-detailed balustrades of the park's many bridges. The waterfalls will bear plastic bags and tin cans. Gazebos and pavilions and public sculptures and whatever other structures built to adorn the park will be pummelled and torched. The park will turn from an asset for future development to a liability.

There is a serious risk that the second scenario will prevail. In the current climate there is no chance that the private developers would dive into the sites in and around the park.

Things might be looking a little better in four years but past experience shows that it takes a long time for recovering optimism to translate into large-scale development in untried locations, which is what the park and its environs will be. If, as expected, the current recession is deeper than the last one, recovery will take that much longer.

The Olympic village has already shrunk from 4,000 homes to less than 3,000, and will require some kind of financial bail-out because the developers Lend Lease can see no commercial justification for building homes there now. The village is in one of the more favoured parts of the Olympic site, being close to Stratford's public transport and the new Stratford City project. If development doesn't stack up there, nor will it anywhere else.

This will leave, for five, 10, 15 or more years, empty sites in three main categories. One will be sites surrounding the park, designated for future development but not being used for the Olympics. Another will be the sites of temporary Olympic facilities removed after 2012. These sites are almost all owned by the London Development Agency, which is responsible for the Olympic legacy.

The last category is land around the Olympic village, which it is not necessary to develop by 2012 but is intended for new housing some time in the future. This is owned by Lend Lease.

If all or many of these developments do not proceed, enjoyment of the greenery and water will be tainted by the presence of fenced-off sites. A potential weakness of the park is, in any case, its lack of easy connections with existing residential areas. A trek to reach it past dispiriting emptiness and down alleys flanked by hoardings will make it that much worse.

At the same time lack of development will mean a lack of residents immediately next door. As the great American writer Jane Jacobs pointed out a half-century ago, parks work only if there are people who use them regularly, and who are motivated to spot and report trouble and complain about bad maintenance. If no one cares much about them, they slide into decline.

The Olympic park, the most tangible physical asset of the 2012 legacy, would then become a problem. It would discourage not entice further development. It would require further regeneration initiatives stretching into a potentially limitless future to rescue it.

It will need both bold and practical thinking, now, to avoid this fate. The London Development Agency is aware of the issue and is developing what it calls a Legacy Masterplan Framework, without having yet unveiled a conclusive answer. Hoardings, it says, will be put up only around places where construction is actually going on.

The LDA is considering an extension of the Cultural Olympiad into the years after 2012 as a way of keeping the place lively. If it can truly fund and sustain a great artistic festival there, it would be admirable but the idea sounds more like the sort of laboured contrivance that comes when culture is used to fill gaps in thinking (consider, for example, the contents of the Millennium Dome). Nor would a festival animate the park all year round.

So while the LDA members are still scratching their heads, here's a suggestion. Why not make the undeveloped sites into a temporary park that would greatly expand the permanent Olympic park in the centre? Why not grow trees there to be transplanted elsewhere in London when development finally appears? Why not offset the Olympics' carbon footprint with a bit of greenery? Why not return some of the spirit of wilderness that prevailed in the lower Lee Valley before the Olympics arrived there? Why not permit more allotments?

It will need money, of course, to make this temporary park happen, but considerably less than the £200 million that the Olympic park itself, with its changes of level and waterworks, is costing. And it would be cheaper than letting undeveloped dead zones lower the value of the whole area.

The main objection would be that, when the time finally came to develop the land, people would forget that this greening was only temporary. The allotments would have put down roots and their owners would lie down in front of bulldozers to protect them. Similar things have happened when developers have allowed temporary uses of sites elsewhere in London.

Amnesiac resistance to development would indeed be a risk that could be countered only by saying as loudly and clearly as possible at the outset that the greening would not be permanent. The LDA, however, says it will not let such considerations put it off. This is greatly to its credit.

It is also intelligent, as the greater risk is that a swathe of east London will be dormant for the best part of a generation and the great Olympic legacy project will be derailed.

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