Narrative constructions of the Lower Lea as a place 2012-2015

In the fifty years that had preceded London’s Olympic preparations, the Lower Lea had struggled with a difficult inheritance from a more industrial past, and decades on the margins. Right in the heart of east London, it had become one of our great city’s most physically fragmented, environmentally compromised and socially deprived districts. The Games have reversed that.

(Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, 2012) Transition

Immediately after the Paralympic Games, the Park was closed to the public once again and underwent a process of ‘transition’ to prepare for a re-opening in legacy mode. LLDC was under pressure to remove temporary structures and reconfigure the infrastructure to enable the Park to re-open on time, to establish management arrangements for the public park and open spaces, to secure agreements for the long- term use and management for the permanent facilities including the main stadium, to release the Athletes Village for its conversion into a residential neighbourhood, to secure developers for the sites earmarked for development and to establish commercial and community uses to generate income and to animate the Park with sufficient drama befitting the legacy promise. Two parks sat within the whole: the Northern Park was a more natural wild-space landscape that offered a route upriver towards the Lea beyond London; South Park was a harder urban network of concourses and spaces. A group of six ‘development platforms’ (LLDC, 2016) were marketed as development sites for housing and commercial development. The main Stadium was converted to a mixed-use but soccer-led stadium, a deal with West Ham

United rescuing it from the earlier plan to scale it down and return it for athletics-led uses. The Velodrome and the Aquatics Centre were soon opened and in public use. Narratives of place were re-formed to suit contemporary purposes: plan-making and property marketing to support new neighbourhoods, brand-building for LLDC, the Park and estate agents, legacy story-telling for the public and for local government, events promotion and operational management.

The scale of the Park was an opportunity and a threat; even on busy days visitors were swallowed by the open spaces and it was difficult to generate a sense of animation, especially in poor weather. However, the spaces were perfect for large open-air gatherings and events and early programming demonstrated how the Park could contribute to the life of the capital city.

Older stories of place in a new context

Longer-standing ambitions were evident within the cocktail of storytelling post 2012, in part because individuals kept the long-term visions alive, and in part because the structure of the emerging place itself exemplified the vision of the early masterplans. The romantic English landscape of the Park expressed an embedded story, one that introduced of a sense of the picturesque to the otherwise wild space of the flood plain. The original masterplan concept was to create the ideal of English parkland, describing a flowing landscape, with the sports buildings like pavilions in a romantic landscape. That was the reason for placing the Velodrome at the top and the stadium at the bottom, with other buildings that just touched in on the Park. It was a classical landscape order: Capability Brown writ large. This theme, present in the early ambitions of the Arc, of Opportunity and pushed forward in the masterplans to support the Olympic bid, proposed that the landscape, once revealed from beneath the scars of industrial pollution, would stimulate a collective memory of something lost. Articulating such values and ideas required skill, and winning commitment to them required tactical and political nous. It is in this practical activity that narrative constructions of ideas and themes were critical to the success and quality of the outcomes.

George excerpt 3

As a landscape architect, the place I come from is I am interested in landscape structure and I am interested in the larger story of landscape green infrastructure in the service of a bigger city system. Thinking about the restoration of the ecology of the Lea, the creation of the flood plain that was in the sunken Valley, I felt really passionate about that, and I am extremely proud that we got all of that that big ecological content into the plans. The way that the rivers work, to me that is the heart of that Park, and you can do whatever else you like on top of it.

Animating the Park: a busy place

The Park and its legacy would emerge from the shadow of the Games. The period demanded reflection on the early promises and confrontation with the realism of what could now be achieved. The London Games had built its reputation in no small part on its promise that it would get legacy right and that there would be no white elephants. There were twin pressures to drive forward long-term redevelopment and the larger corporate deals, while animating the Park from the outset. The sense of urgency within LLDC generated a tendency to experiment, at best, or, at worst, to ‘throw things’ at the Park. The busy animation of the Park with art, culture and events curated by LLDC, created its own slightly surreal cultural ambiance that reinforced the sense of separation between the Park and the areas that surrounded it; a relationship that needed to time to settle and grow.

George excerpt 4

I have a suspicion that the Park will get simpler over time. One of the tendencies with public realm is to throw a lot at it to make it more appealing to a point where you break it, and actually taking it all out again makes it more appealing.

I think to some extent it’s filling up with a lot of stuff. If you look at some of the London Parks from the Vauxhall Leisure Gardens to Crystal Palace, a lot of these exhibition type amusement parks tend to go through a cycle, and then people end up taking stuff out, because less is more eventually. But for while were every good idea finds a home. I think that is part of park evolution: you try a load of stuff out, and if it works it stays, and if it doesn’t, or the fashion changes, it comes down again. I think it’s about satisfying a real here-and-now need in an urban park setting. It will ultimately respond to the nature of the population that grows up around it, and as long as the dialogue between park management and community is strong

enough, it should respond. It’s a canvas on which things happen.

Social structure and place: a relationship in text and on the ground

The early masterplans promoted a landscape vision based on the riverine qualities of the Valley and these created a spine for the development proposals. They interpreted the landscape and generated propositions about the proposed morphology.

George excerpt 5

Do you remember the big push to build up to the edge of the river? The people who advocated that didn’t appreciate the scale of the place. If you think about the existing Parks of London, the idea of separation and distance, and remoteness from the edge is really important and you and have to get far from the edge in order for things to happen. I was deeply troubled by those pushes from some quarters.

The plans for the Park also imposed a broader structure, informed by the twin requirements to host the Games and to enable the legacy developments; this structure spoke to values about the relationship between the new and existing communities as well as the fabric of the city. The plans didn’t just seek to encourage and regulate development, they set out to foster a desired and desirable community. A dialogue was evident between the structure of the plans, the emergent structure of the landscape and the environment in landscape and built environment and the social structure of the area. These three elements - plan/text, built environment and social structure - stood in a dynamic relationship with each other.

George excerpt 6

We set standards about the sort of usability of the Park from a disability and access point of view. We managed to lay out all of those contours so that everywhere worked, there was nowhere that you couldn’t go. We did a lot of work about how you plug that into the adjacent communities as well, so we had this idea of an accessible landscape. And then we talked about the Northern Park and the big space, somebody said, ‘Why?’ Well, because you want to have big mela festival picnics, you know, think of the picnics you could have up there.

At best the Park was a spectacle: it attracted streams of visitors, tourists, students and schoolchildren and, on sunny days, the Park’s play recreational spaces were alive and

reflective of east London’s diverse communities. The urban park demonstrated in its early life that it was capable of responding to diverse demands.

George excerpt 7

I thought that the big spatial qualities of the Olympic Park should be retained because there was a place that you could do big space things, so why fill it up with loads of junk? When you’ve got big space opportunities in a city, then bloody take them. I mean look at the London parks, the Royal Parks are pretty simple with really small areas of interventions around; most of it is about space.

A brand story and the life of the neighbourhood

The corporate branding of LLDC itself and the earnest marketing of East Village and, progressively the newer sites, proliferated in the imagery around the district, creating an otherworldly sense of combined welcome and exclusion. Westfield Shopping Centre always threatened to be a place of high-end consumption and it fulfilled its promise of being a privately managed shopping mall in a deprived district. That said, an inversion materialised; the designer shops, the restaurant chains and even the champagne bars were replete with crowds of east Londoners. Essex had not crowded out Stratford; rather, Stratford inherited some of the amenities of Brentwood, Chelmsford and Colchester. The ‘International Quarter’, the zone of commercial offices between Westfield and the Park, was developing fast, bringing white-collar jobs to the district. Despite the proliferation of cranes and the high specification of the spaces here, the commercial property market in Stratford remained hesitant. Early occupiers were actually public sector bodies, including the Financial Services Authority and TfL. Carpenters Estate broodingly overshadowed the southern end of the Park from across the railway, an exemplar of the failure to improve social housing and testament to ongoing stagnation in life chances of sections of the long-standing residents in the wider area.

The lines are drawn: life beyond the Park

Beyond the Olympic Park, incremental change in the Lower Lea proceeded slowly, effecting piecemeal transformation of some sites and places, while some sites and streets lingered on in more or less shabby and ignored conditions. The Lower Lea remained a ‘work in progress’ if one believed that places evolve in ways determined

by plans. Alternatively, the wider Lea could be read as an exemplar of ‘organic’ development, with evidence of the uneven influence of market forces, giving rise to success in some places while, as one architect suggests, the Park ‘becomes more and more the diamond in the shit compared to what it could have been’.

George excerpt 8

Well, let’s take Stratford High Street. Some unmitigated crap has gone up along there. So we do all of this work on carefully balanced housing and accommodation provision to look for a balanced community in this relatively small area of London, and then we ring it with a forest of one bedroom micro-flats: the jewel that we have created! So every day that another permission goes in and another building goes up, the ability of the Olympic Park to swing the pendulum in the East End of London gets reduced.

George excerpt 9

We saw the North Park as a bigger more naturalistic feature, an extension of the Upper Lea Valley, while the South Park would represent a deeper urbanisation. I always talked about the transept from the Thames to the rural hinterland of London, and I loved this idea of the Park that de-industrialised as it went north. I thought it was a lovely idea; one that was easy to explain to people. And so a lot of the debate was about where was the line of that conversion, as it were. We only got to that in places, and I always felt that you could deliver a lot of the

urban experience lower down the Lea Valley. South of the railway line7 _{you had the chance}

to. There’s some very big bits of land down there, there’s the bloody gas holders, there’s the bit round the lock.

In some neighbourhoods, such as Poplar, the curatorial hand of public bodies was much in evidence; while some bemoaned the loss of social housing into the quasi- public hands of housing associations, decades of investment in housing stock, public amenities and the public realm has had an obvious impact on the neighbourhoods. Many families had remained in the area since its redevelopment for social housing after World War II and had integrated with newer immigrants, some from the Bangladeshi communities around Brick Lane, now joined by newer immigrants from

7 _{There are two railway lines that run east-west across the Lea Valley to the south of what is now the}

Europe and Africa. The attention on the Olympics masked the longer running stories of improvement, evolution or stagnation that have beset the districts beyond the Park. George excerpt 10

There was a sense that all the shiny baubles have to go in to the one place you’ve got control of. What we were trying to say in the Opportunity Framework is that, actually, if you push some of the baubles down into the deeper Lea Valley, not only were you pushing them nearer to more deprived communities who needed this stuff, but also you could use them as triggers for change in those areas. Actually, what I think we’ve got now is just opportunistic land development, because it’s somewhere within spitting distance of the Olympic Park.

The local economy of the Park

The economic story of the Park seemed to emerge by chance. Yes, it is true that champions in the past insisted that east London should be a location for London’s most prestigious institutions, and that without those ambitions, the universities would have brought student accommodation but not faculty to the Olympic Park and Stratford. But the contours of the story, with its specifics of digital media, robotics and creative making, emerged in the latest chapters of the story. If the pioneers for Stratford were begging, borrowing and stealing in the mid 1990s, one gets the feeling that the same tenacity was still being exercised in 2015 to attract some of London’s most innovative companies into the Park, albeit that the bar of quality has been irrevocably raised.

After the 2012 Games, the LLDC had placed a greater focus on economic development, as compared to the earlier plans that had prioritised housing development. The extract shows that serendipity plays a part, and also demonstrates how confidence grew among the agencies involved that new economic and cultural occupiers could be attracted into the area, spurred along by hard work and good fortune.

Graham excerpt 4

Here East is a great triumph for everyone. There was a long fight in the early days to make sure that the building is sort of permanent, so it had to meet Building Regulations standards. It was difficult to persuade the ODA to do it. But nobody really knew what was going to happen

to it. A number of proposals didn’t come off and then in the middle of January 2013, we got a call from BT who say, we want to put BT sport in there and we’re either going to go there, or we’re going to go to Salford. The only issue is, we need to have our studio completely fitted out and ready to broadcast by the end of May and this is the middle of January. There’s no lease, there’s no planning, there’s nothing. The main credit rests with BT who did an incredible job in terms of fitting out. They did it in four months. Remarkable really. Once we got BT in there, that really underpinned the bigger deal on the whole building. It gave them an anchor tenant; they’ve done some terrific deals. We’ve got Loughborough coming in, and we’re going to get UCL, we’re going to get the Institute of Robotics in there, we’ve got the Advanced Propulsion Centre. We’ve got loads of high tech R&D, media, tech, you know, you name it. It’s just phenomenal.

Stitching the hole in the urban fabric: a work in progress

In one sense, the reality of the development of QEOP overcame the (albeit contested) narrative of fragmentation, inaccessibility and pollution and degradation associated with the post-industrial past of the area. There was a legible, bounded place with some established uses and a purposive, credible programme to realise the vision for all of the allocated development sites. The land inside the boundaries of the Park, had become territory owned and managed by LLDC, the public realm reflecting less and less the former Olympic Park and more and more the emerging ‘legacy’ uses.

The delineation between new urban fabric and the older neighbourhoods spoke to the social divide between new and existing communities and various interventions were mounted by LLDC to soften the cliff edge.

Scott excerpt 3

Ordinary people are saying, this Olympic Park is over there but it’s not for us as we can’t get