The whole world watched the Olympics. But what happens beyond the range of the cameras, around the Olympic Park? How can displacement of current residents be avoided? Our author spoke to Eleanor Fawcett, who has been working with London architects on the careful upgrading of the “Olympic fringe” since 2005. She has put together a walking tour for Stadtbauwelt to include the best projects around the park.

The recent history of East London has been that of slow, grinding decay, interspersed with uneven renaissance. Much of East London’s current urban character was formed by its bombardment during the second world war, leaving a heavily scarred, mostly industrial zone, which was then built upon in patchwork fashion. Recently, more so than in any other part of London, one could experience this urban bricolage down near the Lea River: beautiful 18th century terraces abut sunken motorways, stunning 1960s housing overlooks lush canals in the shadow of dilapidated light industry.

Like many places across the world, the traditional working-class social fabric of the area was heavily torn by ‘containerisation’ and the resulting relocation of the docks further downstream, leaving abandoned wharves and warehouses for many kilometers along the Thames. Since then, what are now known as the Olympic Boroughs, including the areas of Hackney Wick, Leyton, Stratford and Bromley-by-Bow were notorious for their poverty and ill-fortune; indeed, they remain among the most deprived areas in western Europe to this day.
However, even before the Olympics were announced there were signs of change. The ongoing ‘artist-led regeneration’ of areas such as Shoreditch and Dalston has turned Hackney Wick into an area with one of the highest concentration of artists living anywhere in Europe, all taking advantage of the retreat of industry to move into large, cheap warehouse spaces, albeit in an area almost entirely without facilities or connections to the wider city. Furthermore, the idiosyncratic and disjunctive zone around the Lea Valley was slowly becoming a romanticised landscape of forgotten histories and psychogeographic resonances, with the wider public being made aware of its strange beauty through the work of writers such as Iain Sinclair and others.

Getting a piece of the pie

Now, with the Olympics nearly here, the areas immediately surrounding the park are subject to a new kind of strain: while it was always in the minds of those organising the Games that they would present a unique opportunity to bring investment into these poverty-stricken areas, the very speed and power of the Olympics, as well as different interest groups with their own agendas, mean that the future of the ‘Olympic Fringe’ hangs somewhat in the balance. The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), who have built the stadiums and park, and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and paralympic Games (LOCOG), who will run it, are both to be wound up after the games, at which point the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) become the owners of the site, planning, commissioning and overseeing the developments that are set to bring 70,000 new people to the area to live and work in the next 30 years. It is basically up to them to ensure that the Olympic Park and surrounding areas become a genuinely functioning piece of London for generations to come.
“If it wasn’t for the Olympics, so many things would just be too difficult”, says Eleanor Fawcett, head of design at the LLDC: „Never again will we have those kinds of budgets”. She and her small team work in a new office building in Stratford with a sweeping view of the park, the stadium and the outlandish twists of the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower, as well as numerous blocks of dubious high rise flats that have been built nearby in the last few years.This view encapsulates the difficulties that the LLDC face, attempting to create positive effects in a situation which for many developers has been a gold rush, paying little concern to anything beyond immediate profit.
After a rather negative start with the arrival of the belligerently anti-urban Westfield mega-mall at Stratford, which demonstrates the sheer inertia of certain commercial interests indifferent to the aims of ‘legacy’ planning, the primary strategy of the LLDC has been to earmark three locations (Hackney Wick, Bromley-by-Bow and West Ham), to become new ‘town centres’, providing the shops and street life that are characteristic of the patchwork of small neighbourhood centres that define much of London. For example; in Bromley-by-Bow, supermarket chain Tesco were redeveloping their existing store, so Fawcett and her team worked with them to integrate the development into the area in a more considered way, with a primary school, ‘ideas store’ library and links to the Olympic park. It is this overseeing role that the LLDC will often play in future, guiding commercial developers into working with a larger plan they might not see themselves as part of.

The second part of the plan is to fully tie the new area into London through transport links. This is perhaps one of the more simple things to achieve as the area already possessed strong transport infrastructure, primarily focused around a number of underground, bus and rail routes that converge upon Stratford, now joined by an international high speed rail station. These large scale gestures of the plan are completed by the stitching together of various green spaces and waterways, a north-south emphasis along the Lea river contrasting with the east-west work on transport links. The intention is to allow for the completion of an uninterruped 30+ km long linear park along the river, a feature first proposed in the 1944 Abercrombie plan for London after the war (see also “Lea River Park” on page 44). Finally, in and around these grand works are literally hundreds of projects scattered all over the surrounding areas, from street signage to parks, residential developments to public squares.

Learning from Barcelona, Munich and the Docklands

What doesn’t help matters is how much stress has been put upon the run-down character of the area as it existed. “A lot of the rhetoric around the Olympics was all based on this quite strong ‘place hate’ idea about the area.” explains Fawcett. “It was all: ‘This place is a dump, it’s this dangerous, awful bit of East London, and the Olympics is coming in to transform it.’” Consequently, a strong part of the fringe strategy has been to accentuate the unconventional beauty of some of the post-industrial landscapes of the area, for example in the sophisticated and intelligent work by muf architects at Hackney Wick, which attempts to reconcile the remaining working class community, the recently arrived hipsters, as well as the inevitable influx of wealthier residents on their way in.
“How you deal with your edges can be make or break, in terms of whether you’re considered a success longterm”, says Fawcett, who sees her biggest challenge as how to integrate the new developments back into London as a whole. The precedents for a project of this kind are numerous; not only in terms of Olympic history but also in various large development projects that have occurred in London over the years. Barcelona is often cited as the best example of the benefits that the Olympics could bring to the city, and the LLDC looked specifically at the strategy for public spaces that Barcelona adopted as a way of guiding their own work. Other Olympics, such as the verdant futurism of the Munich park of 1972 are also seen as influential. However in London there are other urban and political precedents; less than 10km away is the financial district of Canary Wharf, which was created under the control of the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) in the 1980s. The LDDC’s pioneering structure of limited funds but strong planning powers allowed it to steer the redevelopment of the derelict docks, although it is frequently criticised for the creation of an urban ‘island’, where the massive wealth of the financial companies and luxury flats abruptly meets the hard poverty of Poplar – exactly what the LLDC are trying to avoid in the Olympic Fringes.

Limits of influence

The LLDC are lucky in a number of ways, not least because Fawcett and others on the team have been involved with the Olympic legacy since the beginning in 2005, having worked previously with Design for London. Furthermore, as well as the hundreds of small Olympic Fringe projects they’ve controlled, they have also been given the funds to commission their own projects as exemplars, such as a new facilities building for the sports grounds of Hackney Marshes by Stanton Williams, or David Kohn’s ‘White Building’ in Hackney Wick, a showcase building for the artistic community in the area. A renovation of a derelict printworks into exhibition, cafe and outreach spaces, it sits right at the edge of the park, and will hopefully provide a public face to the olympic visitors, helping to stress the character and vitality of the area to those who may not realise that there was life there before the games.

Overall, the LLDC have laudable intentions, and as a functioning part of the London Mayoralty they now appear to have political support from above not only to implement but make plans as well. However, it must be said that there are problems that are entirely out of their control. The Olympics will arrive in the midst of a housing crisis. A perfect storm of rising rents, exacerbated by cuts to benefits has led to the news being regularly filled with horror stories about local people being forced out of London altogether, a process comparable to the ‘banlieuification’ of Paris, in fast-forward. If this worsens, then all the good work for ‘local communities’ that the LLDC have been concentrating on will be useless when these communities are no longer capable of remaining in the area at all, leaving nothing but a post-industrial theme park for the wealthy. That said, Fawcett is confident that the LLDC do indeed have the powers to influence development in more socially sustainable ways, and is hoping that their work can lead the way in showing how regeneration on this scale might actually work.

Adresse London

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aus Bauwelt 24.2012
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