The Olympic Park is really two parks with a massive great road in the middle.
This central road was already under construction before London won its bid, because planners assumed people would one day want to drive to Stratford International station. But it does form an annoying barrier, like the neck of an hourglass, with pedestrians and cyclists pretty much forced to cross the central traffic lights every time. The planners did what they could given the underlying Overground line couldn't be moved, nor ducked under. But with the long-term plan being to build flats either side of this constriction, the Olympic Park is really two parks with a dysfunctional gap in the middle.
But at least you can get across. There are still several genuine disconnects around the edge of the park where, even ten years on, nobody's yet managed to stitch inside and outside together.
• Northwall Road: They needed this kilometre-long cut-through as a northern distributor road for back-of-house services during the Olympics. But they massively overengineered it, have subsequently blocked off both ends and it now exists as an unused concrete chasm behind the Velodrome as the archetypal road to nowhere. It doesn't help that only one footpath connects onto it from the Park, linking to a central point nowhere near any convenient exit. And it really doesn't help that there should be a second connection by the A12 junction but the perimeter fence has no pedestrian access, only a gate for vehicles that's always* locked. Several footpaths in the park lead to this deadzone, and a pedestrian crossing with ramps has been deliberately added on the other side, but it's all wasted infrastructure for the want of a simple gap in the fence.
* At the moment, thanks to the Commonwealth Games, this gate is wide open. Vehicles need to be able to get through to a festival site in the north of the park, plus Northwall Road itself has been requisitioned for secure access to the Velodrome so is brimming with police vans and a private security presence. I do not recommend dropping by what's currently an unfriendly authoritarian enclave. But in normal times, very much locked.
• Leyton: There isn't an easy way into the Park from Leyton. You either divert past New Spitalfields Market or walk down to Temple Mills, two points peripherally one mile apart, because there's absolutely no access inbetween. A path alongside the A12 would solve it, or a footbridge over the railway from the back of the Asda car park, but neither of these are practical future options. It's why Leyton was never a decent bridgehead to the Games 10 years ago, and is still unnecessarily cut off today.
• Westfield: Stratford's mega-shopping centre was destined to be built even had the Games not gone ahead. Alas it was never designed to be easy to get out of, because that's how retail circulation works, so revelled in being the gateway through which befuddled Games-goers would have to percolate. Passing through from Stratford town centre still requires at least one change of level, and even then there's only one direct route into the Park past shops and all the restaurants and the Aquatics Centre. Boundary stitching might improve once the cultural treats along East Bank finally open to the public, but Westfield is always going to be an accessibility blot.
• City Mill River: The northbound path alongside the City Mill River was sealed in July 2007 and has never reopened. That's probably because it used to pass through a manky tunnel under the Greenway sewer which it'd be hard to tempt anyone back into, even with lighting. But it means the riverside path from Stratford High Street suddenly stops dead at a locked grille, down a ramp currently liberally scattered with open suitcases, empty capsules and lager cans, which benefits nobody.
They closed the southbound path alongside the City Mill River in September 2012 and it has never reopened. I suspect I was one of the last people down it after the Paralympic Closing Ceremony. But for the last ten years it's been permanently fenced off, despite being the obvious intended continuation of the riverside promenade through the Olympic Park, with two paths and a set of steps all leading down to a pair of 'temporary' metal barriers. This being East London someone's ripped a hole in the first and pushed aside the second, so you can in fact walk on through the mossy railway arch beyond, but ultimately there's no escape from the overgrown ramp on the far side. This is the Bridgewater Triangle, last used for security friskdowns during the Games and since pencilled in for 600 homes as part of the Pudding Mill neighbourhood. But as yet no flats have been built, and even when they are planssuggest no reconnection is intended which would be a ghastly unstitched error.
• Bow: There isn't an easy way into the Park from Bow. You either divert past Pudding Mill Lane station or walk up the River Lea to Old Ford, two points peripherally one mile apart, because there's absolutely no access inbetween. Barriers include the A12 dual carriageway, a railway viaduct, an aggregates depot and a Victorian mega-sewer, four impenetrables it's basically impossible to do anything about. But it always niggles me that I'm ten minutes from the Olympic Stadium as the crow flies yet it's impossible to get there in less than twenty.
On the positive side, the western side of the Olympic Park is impressively well connected to local neighbourhoods. There's always been a crossing at Old Ford Lock, then sequentially north of that are a 2019 footbridge and 2021 road bridge, the old bridge at White Post Lane, a 2014 footbridge to Hackney Wick and a recently-opened footbridge opposite Here East. As yet there's no evidence that the Fish Island road bridge will ever be opened to buses because the last 10 metres of tarmac remains unlaid, but for cyclists and pedestrians the western boundary is encouragingly permeable.
Also, sometimes it gets unexpectedly better. There's an awkward chasm between Westfield and the Aquatics Centre, thanks to the Overground and other railways, where one loop road descends and another ascends immediately alongside. Alas nobody had the forethought to add a pedestrian connection between the two so shortcutters learned to squeeze through a narrow gap in the railings, which planners then vengefully fenced off. Now they've thought again and are busy making a proper connection even cyclists will be able to use, making it much easier to get from the new university campus to Carpenters Road or from Sidings Street to Westfield. Ten years late, but better late than never.
It's good to see someone somewhere is still thinking of ways to make access to the Park better. There are a few other places they could look next...
Ten years ago I went to the opening day of competition in the Olympic Park but never blogged about it. I would have done but there wasn't time. My brother and his three teenagers came down from Norfolk for the day and we spent 13 hours in the Park, then they stayed overnight and the next morning we hurled ourselves straight into Day Two. I did manage to upload 40 photos and copy ten tweets before I went to bed on the floor of the spare room, but that's all you got at the time. So today I'm going to make good and tell you all about the day we went to the basketball and got to be amongst the first-footers to the London 2012 experience.
Saturday, July 28, 2012
I hadn't slept much. It'd been well past midnight when the amazing Opening Ceremony finished with a burst of fireworks I'd heard but couldn't quite see from my balcony. Now I had to grab breakfast, tidy the flat and await the early arrival of my family who had bags to drop off. Then we headed up to Stratford using the free travel that'd come with our Olympic tickets and met Dad off the train because we'd planned this opening salvo well. Ticket totals for Day One were deliberately much lower than subsequent days to help the Park bed in, with only swimming, handball and basketball underway, but we'd correctly targeted some minor heats which allowed us in through the gates just after 9am.
They'd warned us security might be time-consuming but we sailed through and found ourselves alongside the Aquatics Centre being welcomed by a Games Maker. Beaming smiles, purple uniforms and magenta signage were the order of the day. A Games Maker called Wendy took a photo of our family group in front of the Orbit - thanks Wendy - and then we admired the vibrant wild flower meadows in a stripe along the river. My family needed breakfast after their long journeys so we walked up to the biggest McDonalds in the world and were amongst its very first customers. The interior was cavernous and empty, the staff pleased to finally have someone to serve and the lift up to the roof terrace incredibly slow. I cadged a hash brown off someone while I admired the view.
Our event wasn't until the afternoon so we had plenty of time to wander up the park and have a look around. We passed the BBC studio on the central bridge, where I'm not sure much was happening yet, and several hopeful youngsters hoping to flog souvenir programmes from a freshly-printed pile. We walked round the London 2012 Megastore and shuddered at the cost of t-shirts. We decided not to go inside the startling red and white Coca-Cola pavilion for a photo with the torch, and rightly judged that the Panasonic sponsored box would be even duller. We found burnt fragments of the previous night's firework displays on pristine lawns, so I decided it would be a good idea to keep a canister for posterity. And then we sat down on the wooden terraces by the Lea and watched the cycling road race on a big screen in the middle of the river. "I remember when all this was allotments," I said, and I think they ignored me.
Rather than take root I managed to persuade everyone to explore further so we walked to the top of the park past makeshift and permanent arenas. The flowers around the bandstand were looking gorgeous, even if it was too early in the day for Wenlock to be performing. We peered over the edge of the Eton Manor bridge at the double deckers whisking staff and officials around, or more likely running empty. We explored some dead ends, dodged out of the way of passing street theatre and then returned to the riverside lawns at Park Live. It was warm and sunny now, and nearer to the start time of our event so the lawns were packed. The verdant landscape of the northern park seemed thrillingly new, although I didn't realise quite how many times I'd be seeing it again over the next decade.
We took LOCOG's advice and headed into the Basketball Arena 75 minutes before our session started, which turned out to be pessimistically unnecessary. I sat in a corner seat with my Dad and wished the announcer trying to keep the crowd hyped and occupied would calm down. It was a relief not to appear on the fancam. Eventually we got to stand for the anthems of Turkey and Angola, which isn't something I'd done before, and finally some sport began. It went on a bit. What's more we had two matches to watch, plus a burst of urban streetdance as edgy 'half time' entertainment, so were sat on those plastic seats for almost four hours. At least being basketball it was high-scoring end-to-end stuff, and at least in the second match we got to watch the eventual gold medal winners, predictably the USA. How thoughtful of Batman and Spiderman to come and cheer them on.
By the time we emerged it was already early evening so a lot of the crowd flooded away towards the exit. Youngest Nephew was keen to follow suit but we reminded him that this was a once in a lifetime event so we'd be staying. We chose to head down to the southern end of the Park, past half-telephone-boxes and security boats patrolling the waterways, to select something to eat from the stalls at Orbit Circus. I'd already done some reconnaissance to check menus and prices, so plumped for the MSC Fish and Chips over a roast beef roll or something spicier. The Cadbury-only Treat Kiosks were doing a less roaring trade. We watched the blimp fly over, we reflected on the day's events and we threw our rubbish into the correctly-coloured litter bins.
Despite teenage protestations we were determined to spend even more time inside the security perimeter so returned to the bowl by the mid-river screen. The Park took on a whole new atmosphere as the skies darkened and a range of previously-unseen illuminations switched on. The tops of the signage towers glowed pink, the spotlights around the stadium lit the wrap in dazzling white and even the Coca-Cola pavilion revealed a brighter silhouette. As we lay on the Leaside lawns we laughed at the fools who'd chosen to go home early, at least until we noticed there was a nip in the air and we left too. "Seriously," I said, "we can walk home from here, it won't take long." And so we headed out through the Greenway Gate, and once back in the flat sat down and watched the Olympics on TV because we had no idea what had been going on because we were actually there.
Before bed I uploaded 40 photos to Flickr and cobbled together a few words for Blogger, and then the next day I went back and did it all over again but with handball. What I wouldn't give to be going back and doing that tomorrow.
Today, blimey, is ten years since the opening ceremony of the London Olympics.
You can't have missed the anniversary, it's been everywhere. TV news platforms have published amultitudeoffeatures as have most of the seriousnewspapers, umpteen Twitter feeds and any media presence with a sporting or community bias. Even the IOC released an upbeat anniversary press release praising 2012's legacy, and Radio 4 broadcast a one-hour retrospective documentary the other week which is extremely good, assuming you can stomach any more post-Olympic blowout.
I couldn't skip the occasion, sorry, because the 2012 Games have been at the heart of so much of what this blog's been about over the last two decades. Little did I know when I moved to Bow that an Olympic Stadium would soon be built half a mile from my front door, serendipitously making me the blogger-on-the-spot for the biggest regeneration project on the planet. The Lower Lea Valley started out as a forgotten industrial backwater, was transformed into a spectacular global sporting arena, is still transforming today and I've been on the spot to watch it all happening.
It's ridiculous that anyone ever looked at some grubby rivers near Stratford and thought an Olympic Games could be hosted here. It's astonishing that the IOC took the suggestion seriously and incredible that they ended up voting for it. It's amazing that London duly delivered while keeping the country generally onside. It's phenomenal that the event succeeded in elevating the Paralympics to almost equal status. And it's brilliant that ten years later the physical legacy is a thriving neighbourhood - not perfect, but so much better than it could have been.
As a local, the Park really came into its own during lockdown when I had a world class waterside environment at my disposal and you probably didn't, sorry. The very soul of the place is deeply engrained in me, mainly thanks to a combined epidemiological disaster and geographical accident. I'm one of the few people who remembers what various parts of the site looked like before the Games, immersed myself in the Olympic experience while it was taking place and hung around to watch the ongoing evolution pan out. I walked past the Fridge Mountain before it was a Water Polo Arena and will be back soon when it's part of the V&A.
During the run up to the Games one of the biggest issues related to the destruction of a network of unsung community facilities and unsexy local businesses. Some took the money and fled, turning a decent profit in the process, while others folded because their grubby trades were no longer welcome hereabouts. I still have a copy of the 261-page eviction order, spiral bound and sealed by the LDA, which was hung anonymously on a multitude of parcels of land to confirm extinction of livelihood in November 2005. If the past history of the site interests you a phenomenal website called Ground Breakers tells "the back story of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park from the Bronze Age to the Digital Age", including the option to download the whole lot as a 100+ page pdf.
Ostensibly this mass erasure was for sport but ultimately a lot of it was really for housing, turbocharging what would otherwise have been the slow residentialisation of the Lower Lea Valley. Tens of thousands now live on former railway sidings, ex-industrial estates and evacuated bus depots. Even so, of the five proposed Olympic neighbourhoods only Chobham Manor is now substantially complete, and that only topped off its final block in the last few months. Stratford Wharf has been mostly reappropriated by a university campus and the cultural cluster of East Bank, neither yet unveiled. East Wick so far boasts just one small flat-packed quarter, and only this month has a long strip of the northern park been fenced off for further enabling works. Meanwhile Sweetwater and Pudding Mill have yet to see the construction of a single flat even ten years after the Games, and still won't be finished by 2030.
What's become increasingly clear since 2012 is that economic destruction has continued to swallow up small businesses as the consequences of this regeneration event continue to ripple outwards. The Games themselves never touched Hackney Wick but the developers moved in all the same and are busy converting it into a stack of concierge-friendly brick boxes. Ditto Fish Island which is inexorably having its character sucked out in favour of leaseholds, service charges and top notch fitted kitchens. Meanwhile the City's fruit and veg markets are relocating to Barking because the site's more valuable as flats, the fringes of Maryland and Bow are powerless to resist and every last gap along Stratford High Street has either been upwardly redeveloped or is about to be. And still it comes.
2012's recreational legacy is seemingly strong with all the main venues still in use. The stadium is a premiership football ground, the Aquatics Centre is the local swimming pool and the Velodrome is about to become an unlikely outpost of Birmingham's Commonwealth Games. But the stadium still haemorrhaged public money, the pool is inherently defensive rather than welcoming, the hockey pitches are empty 99% of the time and the mountain bike course never has anyone on it because its custodians insist on pay-before-you play. As a local resident the best bit of QEOP is undeniably the open space between the venues, not the impenetrable bastions of commercial engagement.
Only a minority of visitors to QEOP come for the sport, most are here to walk, cycle, play or simply graze. It's great to see so many here, the park's a total social success, but the temptation is always to pile on more calories rather than wear them off. The first two post-Games cafes have been augmented by additional riverside tables, a parade of hipster options near Here East, a showy restaurant pavilion, a streetfood canteen at Hackney Bridge and infilled coffee shops as appropriate. Throw in the hospitality-based gentrification of Hackney Wick and the cavalcade of corporate dining options at Westfield and it seems you can't just tempt people with a pretty park, you have to tempt their stomach too.
I reckon I've written over 300 blogposts about the Olympics and its local impact during the last 20 years. You may have arrived here as the result of one. I intend to post another tomorrow, and I haven't yet decided whether or not to run with this 10th anniversary for the rest of the week. I think it's important to document how things are now because all too soon it changes, and it's easy to forget how once it was entirely different and will soon be entirely different again. For example here's what I wrote on the blog on 27th July 2012 at the tipping point between before and after.
And if you're hoping I might finally shut up about the Games once the last athletes have gone home, no such luck. We local residents still have to live with the aftermath, and that's a story with at least another ten years to tell. Will the Olympic Park become a tumbleweed white elephant, surrounded by unsaleable shoebox flats, visited by nobody? Or will we gain a rich legacy, blessed by incomparable sporting facilities, with a fresh inclusive community starting to grow? East London's Olympic story still has a long way yet to run, and tonight's Opening Ceremony is merely the end of the beginning.
You mainly saw a fortnight or two of sport. Those of us who live nearby have been living with the Games for the last 17 years, and still its impact fizzes on.
