2012 and beyond
MIND THE GAP
Ben Webster explores how 360,000 daily visitors will get around Stratford during the games
For 16 days in 2012, Stratford will be the centre of the world. Up to 360,000 people a day will visit the Olympic Park during the games, but the key measure of their success will be the number that choose to return at a later date. Will the billions being invested in Stratford “make east the new west”, as Newham mayor Sir Robin Wales optimistically predicts?
If good public transport is the key to urban regeneration, Stratford cannot fail in its aim to become London’s third most important retail centre after Oxford Circus and Knightsbridge. It is already well served by rail, light rail and underground lines but the number of trains will double in time for the Olympics.
Hugh Sumner, the Olympic Delivery Authority’s (ODA) transport director, is surprisingly precise about train frequency for an event still five years away: “There will be one every 13.87 seconds at the three stations, Stratford Regional, Stratford International and West Ham.” Sumner has a yellowed 1948 London Transport poster on his office wall that shows routes to the venues at the Olympics when they were last held in the city. Stratford is not even on the map. But on the 2012 version, it will stand out as the best connected of London’s urban centres, the point where 12 separate rail routes converge.
From February 2009, the Docklands Light Railway will run under the Thames to Woolwich Arsenal, making a single economic area from parts of London divided and isolated by a stretch of water. By mid-2010, the DLR will run from Canning Town to Stratford along a recently closed section of the North London Line. A new loop will link Stratford Regional to Stratford International, allowing fast, direct access to Canary Wharf for High Speed One commuters from Kent. Stratford may also gain a link to the continent if it can persuade Eurostar that it is worth stopping only six minutes after leaving St Pancras.
Further DLR extensions likely
Further DLR extensions are likely to be built to serve the wider Thames Gateway area, complementing two bus rapid transit systems along either side of the river, Sumner says. The East London Line extension will link Croydon with Hackney by 2010, and continue to reach Highbury & Islington by 2011. But the ultimate goal of giving London the rail equivalent of a ring road will have to wait until funding is found to build the missing link to Clapham Junction. An opportunity has also been missed to allow trains to run directly from the East London Line to Stratford, via a short eastwards spur from Dalston Junction to the North London Line.
More capacity
TfL (Transport for London) is focusing instead on providing more capacity on the grossly overcrowded North London Line. It is adding an extra carriage and doubling the peak frequency to eight trains an hour. However, it has quietly backtracked on the promise in the Olympic bid to double the number of carriages per train to six. Sumner claims that none of the extra “white elephants” once the Games are over.
With 35,000 new housing units being built in the area, there will certainly be about 100,000 more people trying to get out of, or around, Stratford each day. But will there be anything to tempt outsiders in? The future use of the Olympic Stadium remains uncertain after West Ham United rejected an offer to make it their new home.
Shopping centre
With few cultural attractions promised as yet, the biggest draw will be a giant new shopping centre to rival Bluewater and Lakeside. Unlike these, though, Stratford’s mall will be designed largely for shoppers arriving by public transport. Perhaps the greatest transport legacy of the Olympics will not be new lines or carriages but a change in attitudes to travel in the suburbs, where the car is still king.
London 2012 will be the first “public transport Olympics”, with only a few disabled spectators arriving by car. Fat cats enjoying corporate hospitality will find there is no parking for their limousines. Plans for two park-and-ride sites near the M25 have also been scrapped, meaning spectators will not be able to count on travelling even part of the way by car.
Personal travel plans
Under the “active spectator programme”, every ticket will be issued with a travel plan tailored to the holder’s needs and promoting walking and cycling. After a slow start, the plans for walking and cycling access to Stratford are now taking shape, with 50km of new cycle routes and an attempt to carve attractive footpaths through east London’s industrial wasteland. The showpiece will be the Greenway from West Ham to Victoria Park, which has been blighted for years by flytipping and barbed wire.
If Stratford succeeds in hosting the first congestion-free modern Olympics, it will show the world that cities work better when cars are all but banished.
BEN WEBSTER is an award-winning transport correspondent for The Times newspaper
GREEN GAMES
John Elkington takes a look at the plans for future-proofing the 2012 event
THE KEY QUESTION FOR ALL those working in the field of sustainable development is whether the Games will turn out – as promised – to be the most sustainable yet. Wherever they come to roost, the Games bring both thrills and spills. In part, it’s a financial issue. The UK numbers are mindboggling – and show a tendency to head in the wrong direction. It soon became clear that the original bid-book budget of £2.4bn had been wildly over-optimistic. A revised £9.3bn budget was announced in March.
On the upside, London 2012,we are told, will be “everyone’s Games, everyone’s 2012”. The idea is to encourage “active participation involving people nationwide in a whole range of Games’ initiatives from community activities and volunteering to sporting and cultural events.” But for me, one of the key attractions has been the pledge to “showcase cutting-edge environmental technology and create assets for generations within a regenerated 500-acre park for the communities of East London.”
Recently, I chaired a session where the 2012 team met those working towards the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler, to explore ways in which we might co-operate on the sustainability front. In the process, I researched the greening of the Olympics. Environmental concerns weren’t uppermost in Greek minds back in 776 BC, when the Games first kicked off. Nor did the Games boast a green agenda when revived in Athens about 111 years ago. But today, green is taking its place on the podium next to gold, silver and bronze.
The first sustainability watershed came with the Centennial Olympic Congress, held in Paris in 1994. This recognised the importance of both the environment and sustainable development, leading to the inclusion of a paragraph in the Olympic Charter acknowledging the International Olympic Committee's responsibility to promote them as a third leg, alongside sport and culture.
Embracing the green challenge
As scrutiny of the Olympics and their impact has grown, controversies have surfaced routinely, with successive Games tripping over that third leg. The first few Olympics after 1994 embraced their environmental challenges gingerly, and it was 2000 before the Sydney Games were hailed as the first “green Games”.
The Australian government pledged a massive clean-up of nearby Homebush Bay; designers leaned over backwards to specify eco-friendly materials; recycling bins spread like rabbits; and the solar-roofing industry basked in the warm Olympic glow.
Thanks largely to prodding from activists, major sponsors including Coca-Cola and McDonald’s agreed to switch to less harmful refrigeration units (with the former actually changing its global refrigeration policy). But even then, the effort stumbled a bit: a year later, with the Olympic complex a ghost town and Stadium Australia mostly empty, debate focused on how many venues should be taken down to allow for redevelopment.
When I visited Beijing recently, host of the 2008 Olympics, I was told that in normal circumstances anyone running there risks asphyxiation. Will clapping in 2008 be drowned out by coughing? Perhaps not – the Communist Party views the Games as modern China’s coming-out party, and Beijing has announced a revised master plan committing to another “green” Olympics. The city seeks to attain World Health Organization air-quality standards by 2008, even if it means shutting down or moving fume-producing factories and plants in the final weeks ahead of the games. (If that doesn't do the trick, Plan B is to wash the gunk out of the air by seeding rain clouds with silver iodide.)
Still, we are moderately optimistic in relation to the impact of the 2012 Games. Besides injecting sustainable thinking into every aspect of the Games, from event management to media coverage, the London 2012 team is driving the creation of the new infrastructure and greening that London’s Lea Valley area badly needs. It is also evolving low-carbon and zero-waste strategies, planning the largest new urban park in Europe in more than 150 years, and helping to restore the river corridor – hoping to showcase how mega-cities can deal with environmental and social challenges.
David Stubbs, environmental champion for the London Games, is well aware of the immensity of the task. “The challenge is to keep all these plates in the air – and spinning – at the same time,” he says. “There’s no killer issue, at least that we can see, except that we have to do it all at once.”
JOHN ELKINGTON is founder and chief entrepreneur at SustainAbility (www.sustainability.com) and blogs at www.johnelkington.com
2013 AND BEYOND
Stuart Watson considers the long-term legacy that could remain after the athletes have left
NO OLYMPIC HOST CITY has ever failed to deliver the Games, but providing a positive legacy has proved to be a challenge beyond many. Governments promise regeneration, economic and social benefits to offset the cost of hosting the event. However, the lasting effect of the greatest show on earth coming to town has frequently turned out to be far from such optimistic pronouncements. Under-used and costly white elephant stadiums and the displacement of the poor have been the most consistent results.
In 2004, a year before London’s bid met with success in Singapore, a report by Demos and the Institute for Public Policy Research was already warning that: “Analysis of past Olympic Games reveals that there is no guaranteed beneficial legacy from hosting an Olympic Games. And there is little evidence that past Games have delivered benefits to those people and places most in need.” Such advice has helped to sharpen the London 2012 team’s focus on the Games’ aftermath, and the London Olympics have already received an early thumbs-up from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on their legacy preparations.
When the chairman of the co-ordination commission, Denis Oswald, visited London in June to check on progress he said: “It is clear to me that London 2012 will serve as a model in this area.” Alison Nimmo, director of design and regeneration for the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), says that London will put into practice the lessons learned from past Games: “We are planning the Games and legacy together. We have a no ‘white elephants’ policy that we will only build permanent venues if they have a sustainable legacy purpose. We have reconfigured the Olympic Park to better integrate it with the regeneration of Stratford, and to ensure the Park and its permanent venues are at the hub of the improvements to the area,” she claims.
Masterplan due in 2008
The ODA submitted a partial legacy scheme as part of its planning application for the Olympic Park in February 2005. However, while it outlines the fate of the sporting venues and promises green space and housing development (see box), the plan is only a skeleton framework. Indeed, the hard work in this area is only just beginning, with a legacy masterplan now in the earliest stages of preparation and due to be released in draft form in late 2008.
“The key issue is how the Olympics impacts on and changes the communities around it. It is so important that they benefit if this is to be successful,” says Peter Andrews, chief executive of the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation, the organisation charged with delivering regeneration and growth to east London.
Throughout its construction and use – and for some time afterwards as the legacy works get underway – the Olympic Park will be surrounded by a nine-foot high security fence. When the physical barrier removed, the metaphorical wall cutting off the surrounding communities must come down, too.
Local participation is vital
Community involvement will be vital if the Games are to have a catalytic impact on regeneration projects in the surrounding areas. In May this year, the London Assembly released a study on the impact of the Games which warned that: “There are already concerns that London’s long-term programme of regeneration is repeating a weakness of previous Games: it risks happening to, rather than being shaped by, the local population.”
Unless the former Olympic Park is well integrated with the surrounding areas and is open and accessible to the people of east London, it runs the risk of being underused and of failing to achieve its potential as a generator of prosperity for the area. “It would be easy to see the Olympics as a panacea for east London, but it isn’t,” cautions Andrews.“ The important thing is not to look at the Games as delivering the legacy, but that the impact is harnessed.”
STUART WATSON is a journalist who specialises in the built environment and regeneration sectors. He writes for Property Week, Retail Week and Regeneration & Renewal
