Root and branch rethink

More than anything it is the regenerated landscape that will transform the 2012 Olympic site. Here, it’s what happens after the Games that will help east London flourish

Words Hugh Pearman
Images Hargreaves/LDA Design

They certainly chose their office location well, did the Olympic Delivery Authority. At first you wonder why they have rented space in HOK International’s Barclays building, which no-one could describe as a highlight of Canary Wharf. But when you step out of the lift on the 23rd floor, it all becomes clear. The huge reception with its white leather sofas affords a positively Olympian view of East London. There in the middle distance is the site of the 2012 Olympics at Stratford, its buildings – especially the Peter Cook/Populous (formerly HOK Sport) stadium – now very apparent. It’s still a big gash in the cityscape, a vast construction site. But by summer, it will start to green up.

I am here for one of those strange round-table meetings in which one participant – US landscape architect George Hargreaves – is on the end of a speakerphone from San Francisco while the others – the ODA’s John Hopkins, and Andrew Harland of LDA Design, the British landscape firm working with Hargreaves – talk me through the pictures. Not that this is a problem for Hargreaves. He has all the images in his head. And as landscape designer for the Sydney Olympics a few years back, he’s used to the business of creating the spaces between large lumps of buildings. But the new 102ha ‘legacy’ park that he and his team are making for after the Games is, he reckons, something very different from any previous Olympics.

‘It’s really interesting three-dimensionally,’ he says, referring to the reinstated river valley and hillocks – or ‘landforms’ in the lingo – being created in the northern, wildest and most biodiverse part of the site. ‘It has a multi-faceted use. We’re excited about how it brings together the social world of London with the ecological park. This doesn’t happen very often. More usually you get one use or the other, not both.’ And this is true. There will be big open-air event spaces capable of absorbing 20,000 people apiece in both the north and south sections of the park (10,000 in one oval space in the northern section alone), and there are wetland and other wildlife habitats cheek by jowl. The ramifications of this have spread right across north London as teams of drainage inspectors spent years trying to identify and stop long-term sources of pollution into the Lea, most of which comes from Victorian suburbs draining into now-culverted east-flowing tributaries. Other teams have spent just as long eradicating the scourge of Japanese Knotweed, hardest to remove of all invasive plants. Nobody wants the new post-Olympic park to be taken over by knotweed.

The British tendency in recent years has been to regard such large events not so much as temporary moments of national glory, more as a state-funded stimulus for long-term regeneration, in a manner reminiscent of the Victorian Metropolitan Board of Works. That, for instance, was always Michael Heseltine’s plan for the North Greenwich district around the Dome, now finally filling out. And when it comes to the Olympics, nobody could claim we haven’t laid on the transport infrastructure. Stratford, a nexus of rail links from the superfast (High Speed One, the express link to the Channel Tunnel) to the frustratingly slow (Docklands Light Railway) via two Underground and two surface railway lines, is surely one of the best-connected regional centres on earth, and some £100m is being spent on upgrading the transport interchange there. In addition, Southeastern Trains’ new Hitachi bullet trains for the route will be pressed into service as a high-speed ‘Javelin’ service for the duration of the Games. It’s a seven-minute hop from St Pancras to the huge, long sunken station box at Stratford, plumb in the middle of the Olympic site, plus the trains will pick up visitors from mainland Europe at Ebbsfleet.  As it happens the first bullet trains were themselves a legacy of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Shame our regional-commuter version is so desperately boring inside, but the point is, this bit of infrastructure was in place years before the Olympics, and how often does that happen?

Most coverage of the Stratford project concentrates on the buildings, in particular the three key pieces of main stadium (Populous/ Peter Cook), Aquatics Centre (Zaha Hadid) and velodrome (Michael Hopkins), plus the smaller venues and Olympic village by various hands.  But what I’m more interested in right now is the ‘legacy’ mode of the Olympic Park. During the Games, the spaces, set by the various channels of the River Lee known as the ‘Bow Back rivers’, are designed for vast numbers of people.  They will constitute a relatively green area, but it is not until after the Games that the real landscape strategy will be implemented, and the site become the largest new public park in the UK since the 19th century. The park will be handed over to the Olympic Legacy Company after the Games and Paralympic Games end, when the temporary venues will be removed, a new access road built (inspired by Birdcage Walk south of St James Park in London), and large areas of hard paving will be replaced by soft landscape. However, much of the ‘legacy’ landscape will be put in place before the Games, so will only needing extending. As Hargreaves says, ‘More attention is being devoted to the period after the Games than there has been in any previous Olympics. The client sees an opportunity to leave the legacy of the park, not just development sites.’ The final park will be largely in place by mid 2013, and pretty much all of it by 2014.

What this comes down to, he adds, is that the post-Olympic park will be a sophisticated range of spaces, essentially three or four design approaches for various purposes. Previous Olympics have tended towards the municipal in their afterlives: this has higher aspirations. Key to it all is reversing the security-conscious Games access strategy, which involves only three access points, instead making the whole site porous, especially east-west. Historically the Lee and its industrial hinterland have acted as a barrier: now the Olympic park is to become a linking device. Hargreaves calls these lateral links ‘stitches’ because they do just that – stitch London together. Hackney Wick and Leyton are joined by one ‘stitch’, Bow and Stratford by another, with many other bridge connections.
The constraints of the site give the eventual park an hourglass shape, with a pinch-point in the middle caused by the vast commercial Westfield Stratford City development directly south of the high-speed station. This tends naturally to divide it into its wilder northern half and more urban southern half around the stadium (designed to be reduced in size from a 80,000 to 25,000 capacity, with much new development immediately to its south). Hargreaves describes the southern section as being more like (a much smaller) Hyde Park. But the test for the whole landscape strategy will be the reinstatement of the natural form of the Lea’s riverbanks and margins in its northern, upstream section, replacing a century or more of effective canalisation. 300,000 wetland plants are being grown as part of this, of native species appropriate for the area, but grown on Wales’ Gower peninsula and in Norfolk before moving to the Lea. What with marshes, swales and the like, this is not just window-dressing: this part of the Lea is designed as an absorbent flood-control measure. It is offset by landforms rising to a heady 15m or so above the floodplain, enough to generate excellent views. These are a beneficial side-effect of the fact that no spoil has been removed from site, just decontaminated, mixed with London’s green waste as a compost, and shifted about. Some topsoil will come in from outside, says Harland, but not much: the site’s growing medium will as much as possible be generated on site. The landforming work is now under way, with the eventual topography of the site now starting to become apparent.

Beyond the big picture are specific smaller areas, such as the riverside ‘2012 Gardens’ co-designed by the young landscaper/plantswoman Sarah Price. ‘Small’ is relative – these gardens are around half a mile long and, representing the global collecting tradition of British botanists down the centuries, are divided into four different climate zones. There will also be temporary wildflower meadows and edge-screening to future development sites, as well as ‘lenses’ of different landscapes at the squeezed centre of the site where hard paving is removed. The temporary landscapes, says Hargreaves, could exist for between five to 25 years.

In the end, the Olympic Park tries to pack a lot into an area that is in world terms pretty compact – around the size of London’s St James’ Park, which is a useful comparison in that it, too, succeeds in presenting its own private worlds while simultaneously being hemmed in by the city. Unlike that, however, the Olympic Park opens up northwards into the vast open spaces of Hackney Marshes along the Lea Valley and so can be seen not only as a sequence of spaces in its own right, but also as a transition zone from urban/industrial to open landscape. It success will be judged by Hargreaves’ strategy of porosity and linkage as much as by its re-imagining of the watercourses that run through here.  Whatever you think of the endlessly moving feast of the Olympic Games, its 2012 incarnation will be over in just three weeks. The Park, however, promises much, far into the future. I think it is going to be good.