Narrative constructions of the Lower Lea as a place 2007-2012

The IOC decision to award the Games to London on July 6th, 2005 shifted the story of the Lea Valley’s development decisively. From this day on, it became certain that existing uses in the land designated as the Park would be cleared. The site would be returned as a transformed ‘piece of the city’ after 2012. The story of the Lea Valley would be written in soil and concrete as well as in words and images.

For five years between 2007 and 2012, the Olympic Park became a construction site, hidden behind a security fence covered by wooden boards that were painted blue. The fence, served as a synecdoche for the entire panoply for the security arrangements

around the construction site and the removal of public access just at a time when the Games marketing strategy was to emphasise public inclusion. The Blue Fence, as it was popularly known, symbolised the new bounded character of this part of the Lower Lea. While the stage for the Games was hidden, the stories of its future proliferated. Experimental themes developed in the earlier periods were rehearsed, adapted and adopted by an ever-widening army of professionals and agencies drafted in from around the UK, and the world, to deliver the Games. The poetic urban design ideas such as ‘water city’, ‘the tear in the fabric’ and the linked metaphor of ‘stitching the fringe’ came into their own in this period, informing the design of the Park for the Games and being absorbed into the plans for transformation into its legacy mode. The ODA produced revised masterplans, taking into account revisions to proposals based on securing cost savings and operating efficiencies. The ODA masterplans also addressed the relationship between the Olympic Park and Stratford City, a huge retail, commercial and housing development for a site adjacent to the Olympic Park. The ODA combined the plans and negotiated agreements that resulted in the housing on the Stratford City site, forming the Athlete’s Village for the Games and a realignment of the entrance to the Olympic Park through the retail core of the Stratford City site (Nimmo, Frost, Shaw & McNevin, 2011). The plans were further developed to address 3 scenarios: the Olympic Games scenario itself; a ‘transformation’ scenario, for a period immediately after the Games when facilities would be de-commissioned and the Park re-opened; and a third and evolving legacy scenario, including the phased release of sites for housing, commercial, leisure and mixed-use development. These plans formed the basis for planning applications submitted by the ODA in 2007 for site preparation, Olympic facilities and for ‘transformation’, namely the works to prepare the site for legacy. A design strategy was also published in 2007 that codified principles for the future development of the site. This included principles for remediation, temporary structures, conversion of the Olympic Village into housing for legacy, establishing transport connections, infrastructure, and establishing which buildings would remain on site post-Games. The masterplans allowed for a phased approach to delivery, establishing fifteen delivery zones that could be progressed incrementally but with a common approach to staged delivery in each instance (Nimmo et al., 2011).

Lower Lea Opportunity Area Planning Framework as an implementation guide In later years of this period, the Government invested significantly in public realm works in the neighbourhoods around the Park, and these become the short term means to enact some of the principles enshrined in the 2007 Lower Lea OAPF (GLA). However, the relationship between the OAPF and the development of proposals for the Park and the Valley wasn’t necessarily clear, especially to newcomers who were singularly focused on delivering the Olympic Park as an end in itself. Kate, an urban designer who worked in the GLA’s Architecture and Urbanism Unit and would go on to work in the ODA and then LLDC, posed the challenge of interpreting development proposals for the park and its infrastructure in this way:

Kate excerpt 1

I believe that the OAPF, the plan we produced after we won the Games, is the most comprehensive and clear and compelling document that exists on the Lower Lea Valley and in my mind everything that’s happened since is all about delivering the OAPF. But it’s funny because it’s not widely talked about. All the things that were set out in the OAPF then make sense of everything that followed. I’ve never heard anyone else involved in it now present it like that. Most people start by saying: this is the Olympics and there was this other stuff around. I don’t think this is the story at all.

The principles enshrined in the OAPF included these propositions: to create three new town centres to support the population growth at West Ham, Bromley-by-Bow and Hackney Wick; to create a linear green spine; and to rationalise the industry and configure its place within a new mix of uses including economic activities. The thematic principles developed in the earlier periods became significant in guiding the government’s public realm investment in the pre-Games period, but it needed people like Kate to bring those principles to bear in the decision-making processes. The Lower Lea was potentially complex, but the ideas from the OAPF and the design thinking, interpretations of the nature of the place generated in the years 2002-2007, brought clarity and provided the framework to guide planning and investment decisions.

This strong current of thinking, a Valley-wide story, ran counter to the myopic focus on the Park itself. Using the design themes from the OAPF, it became possible to re- interpret proposals based on otherwise taken-for granted meanings by situating them within a different narrative. For example, one theme was ‘places of work’. This concept paid attention to the more traditional concern with the Valley’s industrial sector, but also embraced the newer employment that could be created in the town centres. The flexible concept ‘places of work’ invited imaginative solutions to mixing industry with other uses, or growing employment within the new centres. This was a pro-active approach to engineering the shift from old to new employment rather than a defensive strategy based on zoning some places for industry and thus preventing further loss. A similar flexibility was given by the story about green landscape. If the Park was the starting point, landscape would be conceived as the public realm setting for residential and other development, in the style of garden cities or London’s Great Estates: not bad design principles. However, the wider focus on the Valley invited responses to the challenges of building a relationship between urban London and the Lea Valley Park, so that the Park was one step in a north-south green corridor linking Lea Valley to the River Thames. Kate, now an urban designer in LLDC in 2015, gave a contemporary example of her application of long-standing principles to the contemporary developments on and around the Park in legacy mode:

Heritage Kate excerpt 2

Other themes include the approach to the waterways and heritage. For example, on heritage I’ve been instrumental in getting conservation areas declared in Sugar House Lane and Hackney Wick, and that only makes sense when you say to people: well you may think these buildings are worthless but actually if you zoom out there’s only three places left in the Valley that actually have heritage like that. There’s Trinity Buoy Wharf, Sugar House Lane and Hackney Wick and that’s it. Then suddenly people can appreciate why these have value and you can only see it that way if you look at it from the perspective of the Valley as whole.

Places of Exchange

Numerous examples illustrate how narrative themes developed at the time of the OAPF impinged forcefully on development proposals. The OAPF included a potentially ambiguous concept ‘Places of Exchange’:

Existing centres and … new centres … [that provide] services and amenities for both new and existing communities, linking these together to become ‘Places of Exchange’. This concept of ‘Places of Exchange’ builds on the notion of developing clusters of community facilities, where flexible space and shared facilities can be provided to meet demand and the needs of service providers (GLA, 2007).

There was a strong diagram showing the empty middle of the Valley, the former industrial sites, and then the very populated edges of the Valley. This invited a way of thinking about how schemes at different scales, from town centres and neighbourhoods right down to individual buildings and small public spaces, might create social and physical connections. In physical terms, the strategic theme spoke to the need for bridges and connections between the fringe and the centre. In social terms, ‘places of exchange’ spoke to opportunity to bring different sections of the communities together; for example, integrating in-movers with existing residents, young and old, neighbourhoods to the east and west of the Park.

An extended excerpt from Kate’s story illustrates these points: Kate excerpt 3

Our understanding of the inter-relationship between town centres, in the way we understood them, and the growth of the area was ground-breaking. It’s not just a planning designation. The proposed town centres deliberately straddle or bridge that divides. So effectively what you’re trying to do is make life hard for yourself by creating places of exchange, new town centres, in the hardest possible places, on the dividing lines. It would have been easier to create some brand new town centres down the middle that were their own world: very introverted. And then the existing places would carry on limping along being a bit downtrodden.

‘Places of Exchange’ worked as an over-arching theme, a meta-theme, for other urban design concepts that made the leap from planning policies to masterplans and to deliverable projects. Themes included: the principle of residential-led mixed development, comprehensive plans for community infrastructure of education, health and leisure services, based on detailed analysis of the scale of the new population and the deficit in provision for the existing population, a green spine, the connections between park and fringe and the porosity of the Park.

Tear in the Fabric

The ‘tear in the fabric’ (see Figure 6) is another meta-theme developed by the urban designers concurrent with the production of the OAPF. It speaks to the need for making reconnections inside the spaces left by the loss of industry, across the infrastructure like rail lines and water-courses that sever the Valley, between the Valley core and latterly the Olympic Park and the neighbourhoods at the fringes and achieving the north-south connection to complete the Lea Valley Regional Park.

Figure 6: The Tear in the Fabric (Design for London, 2013) Kate excerpt 4

We’ve done really well on the local connectivity, the pedestrian and cycle connectivity, and I think a lot of that again in my view is as a result of pushing to be so precise in the OAPF and not just, ‘area of search for a new bridge’, but actually, ‘one here, one here, one here’ and we’ve actually been able to get developers or different people to deliver quite a lot of those links, particularly in and around the Olympics Park, but also further south like Sugar House Lane, where we are delivering a new bus bridge over to Bromley-by-Bow.

The practicality of what could be achieved with the resources available forced a distinction between design ideas that could relatively easily be implemented and others that are placed figuratively in a ‘too difficult’ box.

Kate excerpt 5

The really tough thing is tackling the heavy infrastructure like the A12 and the railway line, a bloody nightmare. We weren’t able to be as precise with what needed to happen with those issues in the OAPF other than ‘studies needed to be done’ to define the solutions. Unsurprisingly they need a lot more money and a lot more time.

Boundaries

A distinction was established by the boundary between land taken into GLA/LDA ownership and the rest. The ‘Olympic Park’ and the ‘rest of the Lea Valley’ was separated by legal ownership, different levels of investment and powers available and the imperative to clear the site within the boundary. The newly formed ODA, had to concentrate its attention and investment on the Park itself, while sustaining formally its commitment to the long term and to the wider area.

Meanwhile, the development market drove the proliferation of a number of high-rise developments along Stratford High Street with minimal attention to context and public realm. Lower down the Lea Valley, development proceeded in an ad hoc and partial way; some areas remained stagnant and ignored and thereby sustained some of the older liminal qualities of the Valley. The colonisation of Hackney Wick and Fish Island, the industrial estates outside the north western periphery of the Park, by artists and creatives accelerated. All of the available land plots there were bought by speculative developers waiting for values to rise and for permissions to be granted for redevelopment of the former industrial sites for housing: it suited them to allow temporary occupation by artists and not to look too closely at what was going on. The GLA/LDA urban designers saw an opportunity to intervene in the remarkable transformation in the economy and culture of the neighbourhood to shape the relationship between the Park and its fringe, and to achieve in the short term some of the longer term physical and cultural connections that they had imagined in their plans. It was as if ‘legacy now’ could be achieved years before the Games took place. This commitment, bringing cash for cultural projects but with many strings attached, was variously welcomed, received with critical and qualified engagement, and rejected and opposed by the increasingly visible, well-organised and vocal community of artists and creatives.

Stratford City, the site with an extant planning permission granted in 2005, was sub- divided into large development plots. Westfield retail centre was developed out and opened by Lend Lease in 2012, in time for the Games. A housing core was developed as the Athletes Village, on the basis that it would be converted into residential homes for rent after 2012. Further Stratford City sites were zoned for commercial development (the International Quarter) and more residential development platforms were programmed to be brought forward after the Games. Narratives for these developments started to shift from the realm of urban design and into the world of estate agents and marketing brochures, a process that would mature and accelerate after 2012.