Sarah Yates sets out the context of our special extended feature on the 10 years since the London Olympics and the impact it has had on the city.

At an election hustings back in 2008, Ken Livingstone said something significant. ‘I didn’t bid for the Olympics because I wanted three weeks of sport…’, he began. ‘I bid for the Olympics because it’s the only way to get the billions of pounds out of the Government to develop the East End — to clean the soil, put in the infrastructure and build the housing…’ admitted the then mayor of London.

The Olympic and Paralympic Games held in 2012 were one of this century’s most memorable events for London and the UK, yet in some ways these few weeks of supreme sporting achievement were almost incidental. It was how the games could supercharge regeneration, address inequalities and create a better quality of life for current and future generations that was important. This was all encapsulated in one word: ‘legacy’.

10 years after the games in London, our new NLA report showcases the remarkable scale of transformation that has taken place in the east of the capital. In place of gasworks, overhead powerlines, polluted waterways and an infamous ‘fridge mountain’ of discarded appliances is a vast new public park — Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park — along with an extensive network of walking and cycling routes, emerging neighbourhoods, world-class sporting and entertainment venues, higher education and research institutions, the pioneering Here East innovation and tech campus, an international business district and the thriving retail centre of Westfield Stratford City. The area is now on the cusp of its next iteration as an inclusive innovation district with the opening of East Bank, one of the world’s largest clusters of cultural and education institutions. Drawing on interviews that have included more than 50 industry leaders — many of whom have a decades-long association with the site through the delivery of games and legacy projects — we have also sought to address two key issues: what we can learn from the creation and delivery of this legacy to guide the future management and development of the park; and what is needed for legacy to successfully continue.

Legacy is a generational rather than a decade-long project. It began much longer ago than 6 July 2005, when London was awarded the games by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), narrowly beating Paris (the next host, in 2024). Late 20th-century post-industrial decline had seen large areas of land and the lower parts of the River Lea, forming a natural east–west boundary in the city, falling largely into disuse, and becoming a liminal space at the junction of four London boroughs — Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham and Waltham Forest. The surrounding communities experienced some of the most extreme deprivation in London, with an oft-quoted health research statistic identifying that every two tube stops east of Westminster represented more than a year of life expectancy lost.

The area’s capacity for regeneration had been identified in the 1990s, but like so many projects before and since, its potential was only unlocked with a critical step in the development of transport infrastructure — in this case when the 1996 Channel Tunnel Rail Link Act allowed the construction of the High Speed 1 rail link to St Pancras and made development of the marshy land viable. When submitted in 2003, the Stratford City masterplan — developed by Stanhope, London & Continental Railways, Chelsfield, Arup and others, to transform the former railway lands into a new urban business, retail and residential quarter — comprised Europe’s largest planning application since World War II. Even so, it was acknowledged at the time that regeneration would be iterative — what it really needed was a catalyst unlike any other. The Olympic Games provided this: not just a sporting event with more than a century of history, but a symbolic one with few, if any, parallels on a global scale. As described by the IOC, they are centred on the pursuit of an ideal ‘to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind’. Winning a bid to host the third games in the capital’s history, this time with the idea of ‘legacy’ at its heart, could therefore offer a rare opportunity to accelerate the regeneration of east London and catalyse social, economic and environmental change.

Three key principles enabled the successful delivery of the park for the games and set the foundations for legacy: a defined, time-limited goal; a clear vision and purpose; and building in future plans from the start. What made the Olympics unlike any other project with purpose was its fixed deadline: the opening ceremony in the stadium on the evening of Friday 27 July 2012. Failure could never be contemplated: there was too much at stake reputationally and economically. The longer-term vision and purpose of using the games as an accelerant to rectify structural social and economic disadvantages were encapsulated in the goal, formulated with the ‘host boroughs’, of ‘convergence’. Thus: ‘The true legacy of 2012 is that within 20 years the communities who host the 2012 Games will have the same social and economic chances as their neighbours across London.’

The fixed deadline and clarity of purpose — alongside a rare alignment of political parties and, not least, the scale of funding and resources — speeded up processes and removed obstacles that would otherwise have taken years or decades to resolve. Crucially for the UK’s built environment industry, it generated a culture of collaboration and focused delivery that had perhaps not been seen since post-war reconstruction programmes, and provided confidence and ambition to deliver large-scale projects that have continued to advance the industry’s international profile (as we showed in our research, published in 2021, London Design Capital).

A clear vision and purpose meant that the commitment to legacy ran as a core principle throughout the planning, design and building of the infrastructure, venues and facilities in the park under the direction of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA). Critically, legacy masterplans were worked on side by side with the games masterplans, with the latter overlaying the former. The Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC) was founded three years before the games to lead and take forward decisions on the legacy and transformation of the park after 2012. It was the forerunner of today’s London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), the first-ever mayoral development corporation, a non-partisan public body itself established just before the start of the games, in April 2012.

Embedding legacy early on meant prioritising robustness, flexibility, connectivity and above all taking a long-term view, supported by a commitment to innovation, agility to respond to external forces and market demand, and, not least, a coalescence of industry expertise and talent perhaps unmatched in any other project of recent times. The driving principle was not to create a ‘ready-made’ new neighbourhood, but an urban framework that would evolve and, ultimately, merge with the rest of the city. Indeed, it had to be robust and flexible enough to withstand the financial crash of 2008 and unexpected direct interventions by the next mayor after Livingstone, Boris Johnson.

This idea of ‘setting the stage’ prioritised landscape-led regeneration, with inclusive public space enhancing the character of the area. Sustaining the legacy ambitions also meant investing in quality to not only ensure futureproofing but also to get the best value for investment of public money — and it is generally agreed that the LLDC and its predecessor organisations have set benchmarks, standards and oversight far above what is usually required in terms of design quality, accessibility, inclusion and environmental sustainability. Such an approach now also aligns with the current mayor’s ‘good growth’ agenda. Active management of high-quality public realm has also been vital in both generating social value and driving investment. Underpinning all these principles has, of course, been the expanse of a large area of land in single ownership (in this case of a public body). It is no coincidence, therefore, that the park itself is now explicitly described as a ‘great estate’, sharing the characteristics of the traditional central London estates.

In 2022, so much has been achieved, yet legacy is far from complete and indeed the pace of development is increasing. The LLDC’s priorities are the imminent completion of East Bank and the ongoing development of housing in legacy neighbourhoods, with a renewed focus on achieving 50 per cent affordable housing across its portfolio and the delivery of family homes. It is estimated that East Bank will bring an additional 1.5 million visitors to the area each year, and the residential population by some estimates will double in size to more than 100,000 by 2036. The demographic shape of the population will also become more diverse with the anticipated influx of students arriving with the opening of UCL East and other institutions.

This year marks only the halfway mark of the 20-year convergence pledge and, as the LLDC strategy states, there ‘remains significant work to do to fulfil the commitments made in the original London 2012 bid with respect to the regeneration of east London’. Significantly, in terms of better understanding of the much longer-term socio-economic impacts, in 2021 the Institute for Global Prosperity at UCL East, supported by the LLDC and other organisations, initiated a 10-year, community-led longitudinal study in which households in 13 East London neighbourhoods directly affected by the regeneration of the park and the Royal Docks self-report their prosperity.

Long-term legacy is also shaped by the fact that the LLDC itself is a time-limited organisation. The development of plans for much longer-term oversight and management of the park is under way, in a process that the organisation calls ‘transition’. As agreed by the mayor, the LLDC’s town planning powers will be handed back to the boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest by the end of 2024.

The future of active management, maintenance and governance are high on the agenda of priorities among our interviewees. Continuity of stewardship — understanding that the park is an asset that must be maintained for the public good, the benefits of residents and businesses and London as a whole, with stakeholders acting in the collective interest — is regarded as essential to safeguarding the cohesion and quality that have been achieved to date. Any successor organisation must also continue to find a balance between commercial use, to generate economic vitality, and affordability and diversity to ensure that local people share in wealth creation as this area evolves as a desirable neighbourhood.

‘Its ultimate legacy will be its successful integration into the wider city’.
 
Key challenges will include coping with increased demand and footfall in public spaces and transport connections (especially Stratford station, which has become the seventh busiest in the UK) and keeping pace with changes in environmental policies, targets and technologies (the district heating network was considered ahead of its time, but now does not fit with the aspirations towards a decarbonised grid). This once-neglected district will continue to evolve as an outstanding exemplar of urban regeneration if the far-sighted vision and principles of the legacy of the games can be maintained, and the goal of redressing social and economic inequalities is achieved. But with the passage of time and as the London games recede further back into history, its ultimate legacy in physical terms will perhaps be its successful integration into the wider city. By 2036, the legacy corporation area, states the LLDC Local Plan, ‘will have become an established location for working, living, leisure and culture… the benefits of sustained investment and renewal radiate well beyond the area, blurring boundaries to create a new heart for east London.’