Ben Walker, director at LDA design, reports from the ‘The green legacy of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park’ webinar.

It’s 17 years almost to the day that London was declared host city for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and 10 years since the Games themselves. A lot can happen in that time. A child can grow to adulthood, a Park can feel part of the urban landscape, as if it has always been there. Won on the promise of building a lasting, sustainable legacy, did the UK succeed? Is the Park a hero or zero? 

On Thursday 23rd June, Ben Walker, a director at LDA Design and London studio lead, joined Victoria Thorns (LLDC), Dr Dorte Rich (Elementa) and Chris Kennedy (Hackney Council) to discuss the green legacy of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and its impact on the surrounding boroughs.

The discussion touched on how creating the Olympic Park was one of the biggest landscape challenges in a generation, requiring a monumental, complex civil engineering programme. The soil was contaminated, and seven soil hospital were used for remediation, there were pylons and overhead cables which needed burying, the site was carved up by roads and bridges. A myriad of new levels needed to be made from scratch. Waterways required restoration and thousands of homes needed urgent flood protection. Close collaboration was called for across four boroughs: Waltham Forest, Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham. 

The scale of the project was daunting but having the lodestars of transformation and regeneration legacy from the start has made all the difference to the quality of the Park. It would have been perfectly possible to end up with an oversized concourse for landmark sports venues and an Olympic Park which remained woefully underused. Elsewhere in the world, this has happened. For the UK, while delivering a successful Games was, of course, incredibly important, so too was what happened after. 

As a result, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park now welcomes millions of visitors every year. The peeling back of heavy infrastructure post Games allowed a new ecology to take hold. New spaces to sit, play and relax went in. 

The Park is evolving and will continue to evolve. It has opened up access to 226 hectares of green space, with 6.5km of waterways and more than 13,000 trees. Many new homes have emerged in and around the Park. It has been successful in starting to rebalance London, redistributing equity from west to east and promoting culture. The outstanding sustainability principles underpinning the project are now familiar and widely adopted – the design of the Park pushed people to ask more of their councils and public bodies, inspiring new rain gardens, wildflower meadows and urban greening. 

The Park has evolved to become a living laboratory, a testbed to see how London’s changing climate is impacting biodiversity, habitat and plant species. These lessons will shape the next evolution of the Park and spaces across London in the coming decade. 

If the UK is serious about hitting net zero by 2050, and London by 2030, we need to take green infrastructure much more seriously, as seriously as we do grey. Creating the Park provided powerful lessons in the transformative power of landscape, and those need to be applied to all sorts of projects, at every scale, building resilience through supply chains, sequestered carbon and thoughtful design. Now is the moment to ensure the learning of the last 17 years makes a real difference. So, the Park is a hero but only if we continue to make it so.