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Last week, two ministers and two mayors faced the press, and spoke with joy about a shining new city that was flashing up in luxuriant green-and-blue images on screens at their flanks. One of the politicians, Boris Johnson, was Tory, and the other three - Tessa Jowell, Hazel Blears and the mayor of Newham, Sir Robin Wales - were Labour, but they all agreed that the Olympic legacy of 10,000 or more new homes, four new schools and 10,000 jobs was simply marvellous.
The place they were describing is la-la-land, a fantasy world, the kingdom of the birds. They have little apparent clue where the money is going to come from and are pinning their hopes on private developers pumping out the thousands of residences required at exemplary levels of quality and beauty. This despite the fact that the private sector signally failed to deliver the athletes' village unaided and had to be bailed out with public money. The village is a mere 3,000 homes in the most desirable part of the Olympic zone. What, hope, then, for the rest?
These may be hard times which will some day pass but the private sector has never in recent decades delivered what was twirling round the screens: a development of this scale in what is, from developers' points of view, a risky, pioneer location. They prefer to proceed in small, low-risk increments. The nearest equivalent to the proposed legacy is the far smaller Greenwich Millennium Village, which, despite £200 million of public investment, has tottered to its current 1,100 homes over the course of a decade of unprecedented boom. Another 1,800 homes are promised there in the future.
Equally optimistic is the idea that crowds of 25,000 will come to see athletics at the post-Olympic stadium, when the most that existing athletics venues draw is about 3,000. Ditto the idea that the million-square-foot media centre will become a job-creating hub of business. This is vast - the same size as the HSBC tower at Canary Wharf - but in an ill-favoured spot, a Siberia of patchy public transport and not much else.
In other words the legacy plan embodies a philosophy that is now looking very out-of-date. It is founded on the idea that private developers and contractors and their friends the banks are wise and omnipotent in all things, and that we can entrust to them the delivery of great works for the common public good.
If the business plan for the legacy seems to have been put together by swivel-eyed Professor Branestawms in a laboratory full of exploding test tubes, the architectural plans are sober to a fault. Showing dense apartment blocks distributed about the perimeter of the park in largely square-ish arrangements, they resemble more the stock-taking inventory of a stationery business: a catalogue of grades of Manila.
The legacy masterplan is the work of three practices, EDAW, Allies and Morrison, and the Dutch KCAP. All have a reputation for competence and professionalism. KCAP is the most radical of the three, and EDAW, which carried out the much-praised revitalisation of Manchester's centre, the most conservative. Allies and Morrison is somewhere in the middle. They are a slightly odd trio, the choice of clients who want to hedge their bets (some safe pairs of hands, a dash of Dutch vim) rather than set a vision and find the best person to achieve it.
Jason Prior of EDAW says that the current plans are the result of unprecedented levels of research. The plan is faultless for the way it shows a sensible provision of schools and a mixture of sources of employment. It meticulously gathers up and lays out all the good ideas anyone has had about planning in the past 20 or more years: that it's good for places to be active at street level and good to consult people, that it's good to be sustainable, to encourage biodiversity and "productive landscapes" where people can grow their own fruit and vegetables.
Prior also stresses the importance of one of the plan's main ideas, which is to divide the site into six neighbourhoods, each one taking its character from the things around it. Sadly, these places are limply named. Pudding Mill Lane is described as "work-live with a unique waterways relationship".
Another, Hackney Wick East, is a "learning, living and working neighbourhood". Old Ford is a "peninsula with distinct water frontages".
Despite frequent use of words like "unique", "distinctive", "character" and "vibrant", the plan currently looks bland and sparkless. Prior argues that the plan will take more than 20 years, that many different architects will design the individual elements and that therefore it would be wrong to show the housing blocks in any detail. This is a fair point, but what is lacking is any big idea to drive the great project forward and strengthen it against the assaults of compromise and expediency.
New settlements at the scale of the legacy masterplan need such ideas. Sir John Nash's creation of Regent's Park, which like the legacy plan involved putting dense but desirable housing around a green space, was governed by the idea of applying the ideas of picturesque gardens to town planning.
In recent years the Borneo Sporenburg development in Amsterdam's old docks was guided by the desire to find ways of achieving high densities with houses that rarely rise above three storeys. The district of Hammarby in Stockholm set out to pioneer new levels of sustainable development, and succeeded. Both these developments started in the Nineties, are hugely successful, and are now imitated all over the world, including by the planners of London's Olympic legacy.
It would even be possible to learn something from the Palm, the artificial peninsula built off the coast of Dubai. For all the financial travails that Dubai is now suffering, the Palm is a brilliant device. It takes sand and seawater and combines them to create dozens of miles of something valuable, beach. At the same time it has created an image that is now world-famous.
Hammarby was due to be Stockholm's athletes' village had it won its bid for the 2004 Games. Why then could not London's Olympics generate something equally brilliant, and influential? We are bigger than Stockholm, Amsterdam and Dubai, and - unlike them - we actually got the Games. Exactly what this big idea might be (and it is of the nature of such things that they are different from their predecessors) can only come from stronger leadership than the Olympic legacy has yet been given.
Right now the legacy plans are back- to-front. The hard practical stuff of funding and delivery is in the realm of fantasy, while the place where an inspirational idea should be is occupied by dutiful box-ticking. Both need to be sorted out. Creating "world class" new communities will almost certainly require more public funding than has yet been offered. It will need government to step in rather than leave it to developers. It will require leadership from whoever is put in charge of the project.
Without these things last week's press conference was an exercise in wishful thinking and cant, and a prelude to a long slide into underachievement. With them, fine new places to live can be created.
Reader views (7)
It's not too later to show a little sanity, and cancel the olympic idiocy NOW.
- Karsten Duncan, Perth, Australia, 21/02/2009 12:18
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Sweden's Hammarby district is certainly much nicer than any of the plans submitted by architects here. But why should they bother, the UK areas will be ruined within a year or so by the large number of lazy, self indulgent, self pitying slobs 'with rights' who live there.
- Helen, norwich, 20/02/2009 14:35
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Sweden's Hammarby district is certainly much nicer than any of the plans submitted by architects here. But why should they bother, the UK areas will be ruined within a year or so by the large number of lazy, self indulgent, self pitying slobs 'with rights' who live there.
- Helen, norwich, 20/02/2009 14:35
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The legacy from the Beijing games will illustrate the situation we are in in London. In my sport alone there were over 500 enquiries to try the sport to just one club. How many could they take?? None - because we don't have the facilities. Across London we could have taken 10, because we don't have the facilities and the necessary access to time in them. The sporting legacy will not go far enough to undo the 50 years of non investment in London sporting infrastructure, that will take decades and billions to put right. RF is indeed missing the point, London needs the facilities and more to offer opportunities to people, of all ages to get involved in sport and find something to do rather than run around on the streets this would also reduce the burden on the NHS. And, many of the run down areas would be a darn sight better if some of the people living in them actually didn't wreck their own environment. I've seen very nice housing areas ruined inside of 6 months by the people living there. There is a legacy and one that sport needs to enable people to get involved. Will the legacy be worth it? No because it is being spread into all sorts of areas. Are we paying too much for the venues? Yes, undoubtedly. Should we carry on? Yes definately, but keep control of it and do it well.
- John Whitby, Peterborough, Cambs, 19/02/2009 21:39
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I really hope that an innovative approach is taken to planning the living space legacy of the Olympics - I come from Hackney and now live in the mentioned Borneo Sporenburg area of Amsterdam. If the legacy of the Olympics is to leave living space as in Amsterdam then the East End of London will be a true winner. London needs innovation in its housing not eyesores.
- Julian, amsterdam, 18/02/2009 18:32
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I don't think R.F. from Yorks is grasping what the Olympic legacy is actually about.
- Darren, London, 18/02/2009 17:23
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A more fitting legacy would have been to spend the billions on improving transport, building homes, schools and hospitals - rather than throw it all at venues to accommodate sport for two weeks. Olympic sized stadia are of little use to people living in run down areas. They would prefer (and benefit from) decent housing, parkland, schools, hospitals and a safer environment. The 2012 games will prove to be a financial disaster incurring debt of astronomic proportions embarked upon merely as a means of boosting the egos of a few politicians and bringing a few "has been" athletes back onto the front pages of newspapers.
- R.F., Yorks, UK, 18/02/2009 14:11
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