In 2012 the Olympics landed on my doorstep, 20 minutes from home. How fortunate was I?
In 2022 ABBA are landing on my doorstep, 10 minutes from home. Mamma Mia.
Agnetha, Benny, Bjorn and Anni-Frid have been promising new music since 2019 without ever quite delivering. Finally yesterday they released two newtracks, plus news of an album arriving just in time for Christmas, plus details of a virtual show at a single global location. The quartet spent five weeks performing songs in front of 160 special cameras to help create a virtual performance featuring themselves as avatars circa 1979, which is to be presented inside a purpose-built 3000-capacity venue. When I saw these two struts going up at the start of June, little did I imagine it'd be happening here.
The chosen site is a patch of hardstanding outside Pudding Mill Lane DLR station, specifically on the corner of Pudding Mill Lane and Barbers Road. It's where a lot of hospitality transfers took place during the Olympics, later became part of the worksite for a Crossrail tunnel and was subsequently where West Ham dumped their stadium's lower seating during the summer athletics season. More recently it's been entirely empty (other than that week last summer when a drive-in cinema turned up), a wasted space where it'd make sense to build hundreds of flats but nobody yet has. It turns out ABBA are turning up instead.
This was held in an upstairs room at the Holiday Inn Express on Stratford High Street in November 2019. Given that most people don't think to pop inside a budget hotel on a Wednesday afternoon, I suspect the number of people attending would have been negligible. But the clues were there. The blurb described this as "a one of a kind show with state of the art technology", which is exactly what we now know it will be. It also claimed this would be an "iconic venue" for "visitors from around the world" and that Pudding Mill Lane would become "London’s new destination". That seemed utterly ridiculous at the time but it's not quite so ridiculous now, when all is said and done.
All that was known about the company behind the scheme was that they were called Aniara and had a seriously minimal website (which has since been reduced to a single glittery holding page). Aniara is in fact the name of a sci-fi poem published in the 1950s by a novelist from Sweden, so maybe that was a further clue nobody spotted. Back then the plan was to start building in October 2020 and open doors to the public in October 2021 but the pandemic delayed things, as it turns out by exactly seven months, with opening day now scheduled to be 27th May 2022. Happy New Year.
The mysterious website included an artist's impression of the proposed theatre, which was hexagonal in structure around a low-slung dome. Rather than reveal the arena's ultimate purpose it merely splashed the word LOGO in big letters above the entrance... although it doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to replace that with the name of a pop group famous for their four-lettered logo. When I uncovered the venue's existence in July last year I failed to put any of these clues together, because who would, indeed that's the name of the game.
The London Legacy Development Corporation met to approve the development in the week immediately before lockdown. Planningdocuments confirmed that the central auditorium would be 61m across and could accommodate 3000 people, 1647 of them seated and 1353 standing. All structures would be demountable and transportable, because ultimately this area is going to be flats. The theatre would open for eight performances a week, with Monday the day off and Saturday and Sunday the days with matinees. Typically the venue would open at 6pm each evening with show time from 8pm-10pm and final curfew at 11pm. The surrounding concourse would contain up to 400 square metres of retail, food stalls and bars for attendees to enjoy before and after the main event. And the vast majority of punters were expected to turn up by DLR (not necessarily from Waterloo).
A construction team has been busy building the temporary theatre for the last three months, and I've been walking past on a regular basis oblivious to its ultimate purpose. The main struts went up first, joined to form a hexagonal crown 25m high, and right now the central dome is complete bar gaps where the entrances will be. There's a lot more to do, hence opening day is still nine months off. I wonder if things were held up slightly by the recent apocalyptic flooding outside Pudding Mill Lane DLR, which would have affected this site just as badly as the station torrent you saw on video. The Environment Agency had recommended that "finished floor levels are set above the 2100 breach flood level, which is 4.7 m AOD", although in this case even that might not have been enough to avoid an S.O.S.
I cannot quite comprehend that this Stratford backwater is about to become somewhere millions of people now want to visit, and several thousand daily actually will. But those who only make the 30-second walk across the road from the DLR station may never realise quite how underwhelming the immediate surroundings actually are. Yesterday's launch with Benny and Bjorn interviewed at the top of the Orbit made the backdrop look impressive, but the reality on the ground includes acres of empty hardstanding, a couple of electricity substations, a subway littered with pigeon droppings and, immediately alongside on Barbers Road, a queue of tankers waiting to dump their load at Regional Waste Recycling Ltd. I do I do I do I do I do not think it's what The Visitors will be expecting.
Planning conditions restrict the site's permitted usage to 31st March 2025, including site re-instatement, which means the Abba Arena show will have to close before the end of 2024. But that still leaves time for 1000 performances over two and a half years, potentially viewed by 3 million people, so there's no need to despair if you don't get some of the firsttranche of tickets released next Tuesday. What may be a lot more awkward if you're an ABBA fan in Stockholm, Sydney or Santiago is simply getting here, not to mention the cost of flights and accommodation, whereas some of us are just gobsmacked to have a world class entertainment option ten minutes from home. Once again the winner takes it all.
