A thousand issues to resolve

The reality of the development of the Park created innumerable delivery challenges. The excerpt below from a British Waterways manager is illustrative of the level of complexity of the scheme. This is one example chosen from numerous stories. It demonstrates both the technical challenges but also the political nature of the issues that had to be confronted at every step.

Scott excerpt 2

If you remember, the first EDAW master plan was to do with cutting back the waterway walls and creating a huge almost natural riverside, almost like a tidal flood plain and estuary, encouraging birds and what have you. British Waterways knew at the time that that was impossible. It’s feasible but it’s not viable because the cost of breaking out those walls and to move those banks back was a non-starter. Yet it took 18 months maybe even more to come back to a more realistic vision for the Olympic Park. If you just knock back those big concrete walls which were built in the thirties as a flood defence system, you’ll find it’s all contaminated land behind. We were arguing against the original proposal for about two years. The Environment Agency had bought into it. While we’re on the subject, the EA said, ‘over our dead bodies are you going to build a lock to impound the waterways’. They’re still alive and we’ve done it.

The accord struck between the GLA and the Treasury came under pressure when the Conservatives took control, first, of City Hall (2008) and then, second, of Government (2010). The Government’s policy was to close down the ostensibly profligate and inefficient LDA. Once the LDA was stripped of its role in delivering legacy, having

increasingly directed its London wide resources towards it, the incoming London Mayor had little trouble winding down the organisation.

With the ODA carrying the primary responsibility for developing the Olympic Park, the legacy agenda became a plot within a plot, authored initially by the LDA, then passed to OPLC/LLDC. While OPLC/LLDC’s legacy discourse was focused on the Park and its fringes, the Olympic Host Boroughs adapted and reframed the legacy agenda, enlarging its focus and directing attention towards the life chances of residents in the wider sub-region. In this period, with all eyes on the development of the Park for the Games, the regeneration of the Lea Valley became the counter- narrative:

Matthew excerpt 12

Around this time (in the period following the bid decision), ownership of the wider regeneration agenda sort of fell away. There was a lot of socio-economic work being developed in the LDA and beyond, but the overall leadership and how that fitted into the emerging delivery arrangements was less clear. The was some expectation originally that the ODA could be responsible for regeneration, but it became pretty clear soon that because of their primary responsibilities to deliver the site and the facilities that they really didn’t have the focus or the bandwidth to look at the wider agendas.

Regeneration was a story authored by some longer-standing members of the establishment; a memory that some strove to sustain against the imperatives of the day. These were the people committed to the development of ‘a proper urban place’ to quote one respondent, or more generally those who in the internal debates sided with ‘the communities’ as well as with the Olympic project per se. Progressively, the development of LLDC absorbed the regeneration agenda into the legacy mission. They recruited a number of leading and experienced champions of the regeneration agenda from the LDA, and from the local area, into senior positions in LLDC.

Many of the smaller battles for the future of the Park became the site of contested narratives. A number of higher education bodies were interested in creating student residential accommodation in Stratford; but leading protagonists countered with the argument that if east London was to become a location associated with world-leading

uses, then planners must insist that faculty from prestigious universities, not just student residences, be located there. British Waterways meanwhile battled on multiple fronts. In order to impound water and create navigable stretches within the watercourses, they had to overcome the Environment Agency’s insistence that the River Lea’s tidal flows must be sustained. In a separate battle, we learned from the quotes above that a British Waterways director had successfully insisted that steps be introduced to enable the public to move between the concourses of the Park and the lower levels of the canals flowing below; the conflict with the policy to create an ‘accessible park’ was overcome by the incorporation of both steps and accessible slopes throughout the Park. The dominant story of the Park’s future evolved through numerous iterations, as smaller battles were fought and resolved.

The OAPF’s planning policies were underpinned by narrative themes. These themes were not a dominant feature of the document, though, as with the example of ‘the tear in the fabric’, they appeared discursively in the conversations about the document and its policies. The narrative themes, in this sense, acted as communicative tools through which the ambitions of the Plan, in this case the OAPF, were articulated and shared.