Ten Years On

Ten years after the Olympic Games, a number of those involved in the design and development of the park look back on their engagement.

Nick Edwards, Architecture Crew, Youth Architecture Forum

My involvement in democratising the landscape of the Lower Lea Valley started in the halcyon New Labour days of the early noughties, with its ‘Sustainable Communities’ agenda. I was in the right place at the right time, living in LB Newham and working on estate renewal as part of a New Deal for Communities programme.

In 2003 I co-founded Fundamental

Architectural Inclusion, a CABE-funded Architecture Centre with the aim of building long term relationships with people to help them genuinely take part in the process of change in their neighbourhoods. Against the massive backdrop of the Stratford Metropolitan Plan, our pilot project tested the appetite of young people to be involved. Our approach was creative, utilising film and other multidisciplinary techniques, which led to the birth of the self-styled Architecture Crew, Britain’s first Youth Architecture Forum.

In the same time frame, London was bidding to host the 2012 Games, which created a great energy and focus for the Crew. They carried out

peer research to gauge the effect of hosting the Commonwealth Games on young people and East Manchester’s regeneration and even presented their own designs for the Aquatics Centre, following the same design brief as the architecture competition to the 2012 Bid team.

Park Life Legacy Youth Panel Event 2011

© Fundamental & Olympic Park Legacy Company

London winning the Bid in 2005, and the subsequent legacy imperative offered a fantastic opportunity to roll the Crew model out across the host Boroughs through the creation of the Legacy Youth Panel [LYP]. We facilitated monthly meetings with young people, EDAW and the masterplan team, where the Panel critiqued the masterplans as they emerged, culminating in a Manifesto, and making an official response to the Legacy Masterplan Framework. We also worked in primary and secondary schools across the host Boroughs, feeding ideas for the park directly into the masterplan team.

Young people were instrumental in highlighting gang-related territorial postcode issues that could plague the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park [QEOP], prompting the new E20 postcode. They also sat on the judging panels for international architecture competitions, resulting in Erect architectures’ Timber Lodge and Tumbling Bay playground in North Park and James Corner Fields Operation’s South Park Plaza. My own involvement culminated with LYP members regularly sitting on the Quality Review Panel and the creation of a Youth Board for LLDC in 2014.

I was privileged to have witnessed first-hand the transformation of this corner of east London from neglected fly-tipped brownfield land to undulating wildflower meadows, wetlands and reed beds along the former tidal, canalised river Lea. I now work as an architectural tour guide and have proudly shown hundreds of people from all around the world the QEOP, telling the story of the pivotal role young people played in shaping it. In the early noughties, young people were lucky if they got to ‘choose the colour of the swings’. It took a lot of hard work and lobbying to get to a point where they are now more likely to be involved in the redesign of their neighbourhoods.

Nick Edwards is an architectural educator and Tour Guide; he co-founded Architecture Centre Fundamental Architectural Inclusion 2003–14 LB Newham.

Phil Askew The ‘expert client’

In 2009, I was privileged to be asked by John Hopkins to ‘help out’ on the client team for the delivery of the 2012 Olympic Park – an experience that for me has been transformative. When John described the brief, I got it – the opportunity for landscape architecture to reflect a bold new approach and respond to the real challenges of climate change and city living.

In the three breakneck years that followed, I had the opportunity to work with some amazing people and learn daily from an extraordinary team of project managers, designers, and experts. It enabled my transformation from a designer to a client, and in doing so, I realised that an expert client enables the creation of a good brief and a design team to work effectively and collaboratively. Sadly, John passed away before the completion of the park for the Olympics, but I was hugely inspired by his passion and commitment and today I often ask myself – what would John have thought?

The landscape vision for theOlympic Park was a bold one which set out to challenge thinking and show how relevant green infrastructure is in the face of a changing climate. Every part of the completed landscape was carefully considered and had a purpose and integrity. The process of ensuring all the components, soils, plants, drainage, lighting, irrigation, management, and buildability worked together required huge effort and collaboration. For me, it demonstrated that we have worldleading expertise and skills to design and deliver landscape architecture at scale and, in doing so, change perceptions and design approaches. The park became the star for those visiting the Games and demonstrated to a global audience the power of great landscape architecture.

Dr Phil Askew is Director of Landscape & Placemaking at Peabody. He is leading on Thamesmead, London’s New Town and one of London’s largest regeneration and development projects.

Ralf Voss The Athletes’ Village

When we received the call to come to London, we were open for everything but certainly not sure what we were getting into. The projects we had done previously in England, like the landscape design for Tate Modern or the Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, were more compact and clearly structured compared to the Athletes’ Village. The situation on site, with its vast soil remediation process, stripped of almost all natural and cultural context and a draft masterplan that did not have political backing, did not bode well for a Swiss landscape team.

With a little help from our friends, we quickly established a first London base in Borough Market and filled the space with a large-scale work model to fast track the design and the coordination process with clients, developers and the master planning team, as well as with a series of different architects and planners. VOGT had used a design process

based on analogue model work successfully before, but this time the method was applied to a whole urban quarter and its variety of open spaces. It also showed its merits as a tool for communication within our office and with the large and always changing design teams of architects, with client representatives and authorities alike. Scale and model changed over months and years, but the landscape story remained. The landscape architecture was key to establishing this new part of London as an urban quarter and not a residential estate. The new landscape brought back elements and reminders of the former natural, infrastructural, and cultural context of the Lea valley. It pushed the questions of sustainability, urban nature and rainwater management in dense urban quarters further and made a clear statement of how the legacy of large scale events can be achieved for the London games and for other events to come.

Model for the Athletes’ Village

© Vogt

Ralf G. Voss, landscape architect at VOGT Zurich, trained in Hanover and Edinburgh, was VOGT’s project director for the East Village Landscape.

Peter Neal Starting with the park

I was seconded part-time to support the planning and design of the Olympic Park a year after London won the bid to host the Games. Working for both the Olympic Delivery Authority and CABE Space created great synergy, giving us the chance to put CABE’s growing body of research and guidance directly into practice. Here was a unique opportunity to collectively create and test a truly contemporary model for twentyfirst Century urban parks in London and demonstrate how to start with the park at a significant scale.

The project respected but did not replicate London’s great pedigree of public parks. It has transformed a neglected and polluted stretch of east London, providing a green heart and ecological infrastructure for the increasingly dense and high-rise communities of Stratford. Central to its success was designing the sequential process of change rather than adopting a fixed approach to master planning; embracing the Games in 2012 whilst preparing in parallel for the subsequent transformation and long-term legacy. For me, the particular beauty of the park is not static but dynamic, expressed through this living and working landscape – the changing of the seasons, the song of reed warblers, raucous picnics and the hubbub of children playing at Tumbling Bay. The stature of the project brought together the very best of the landscape professions who somehow were not scared off by the intimidating and punishing programme – brief-writers, ecologists, engineers, planners, politicians, project managers, quantity surveyors, designers, horticulturalists, soil specialists, nurseries, contractors and landscape managers. Individually and collectively, they all made the park what it is today, and most but not all are named and featured in the book John Hopkins and I wrote about the project. But especially, the park represents a remarkable professional legacy and testament to John’s vision, tenacity and wit for the urban landscape.

Park during the Games

© Peter Neal

Peter Neal is a landscape architect and environmental planner and a fellow of the Landscape Institute.

Simon Green A true piece of green infrastructure

Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park continues to develop as a positive legacy of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. As part of the team working with the lead designers (LDA and Hargreaves), Arup developed the detailed design and specifications and led and coordinated the public realm and landscape design team for the South Park, through the planning, construction, tender and implementation process. This was my first experience of a truly landscape-led and systems approach to solving complex and technical challenges and master planning part of a city.

Sustainability and multifunctionality, as well as beauty, were at the core of the landscape proposals and at all levels of thinking, from the installation of a soil-washing plant to clean 30,000 tonnes of site material for reuse in the works (ensuring a cut and fill balance for the project and the reclamation and cleaning of 8.5km of riverside to transform the waterways throughout the park), down to the detailed specification of non-PVC pipes for surface water drainage to reduce the use of plastics and cut embodied CO2, and the use of concrete mixes with the highest possible recycled material content.

A true piece of green infrastructure, QEOP has enabled the regeneration of this part of East London, and demonstrates the power of landscape to generate value across the spectrum – getting the landscape or GI in first as catalyst for development whilst addressing climate change, biodiversity resilience and adaptability. The involvement of multiple stakeholders and public private partnerships as well as the local community both at Games time and in Legacy mode has ensured the success of the park, with rigorous management and maintenance considered from the outset.

This landscape-led multidisciplinary team approach must be seen as the norm rather than the exception in city design and regeneration.

Simon Green is a landscape architect and master planner at Arup. He is a visiting tutor for landscape design and urbanism at Kingston University and a panel member on the High Street Task Force.

Andrew Harland Living the park

“Where has the park gone?” This was the first question I asked when LDA Design took on the landscape masterplanning of the Olympic Park in 2008. Civil engineering infrastructure had come to dominate the park and fragment the site. It was essential that landscape architects took charge, to secure a decisive response at a scale to match the infrastructure and the games buildings. We identified the site’s real asset, the River Lea, sluggish and polluted and sunk deep in a channel. The steep banks were pulled back to create the park and to give the river a heroic presence.

I think it was a defining moment for the profession when LDA Design took on leadership of the largest and most complex landscape project that has been delivered in the UK, with a team of 20. There was a lot of scepticism at the outset among the other project teams because we were “only” landscape architects, about to disrupt the progress of the engineering and construction. Over time, we changed perceptions – through persuasion, tenacity, and by delivering. During that three-year design phase, we lived the park. I had never experienced such intensity before. Every move was made in the glare of intense national scrutiny and governed by sheafs of protocols. As landscape architects, we were at the interface of the competing demands of every interested party: the venues and the infrastructure teams, the ODA departments, and statutory stakeholders. Our co-consultants proved to be fantastic collaborators, but we all had to raise our game to a whole new level. It was fun, bonding, and massively rewarding.

LDA Design has since worked on a dozen Legacy projects and my close bond with QEOP is constantly reinforced, from the University College London East [UCLE] campus masterplan and East Bank to a landscape protection study and being on review panels. The power of QEOP lies in its social purpose and the sloping lawns of the River Lea throng with local families every weekend. Now my daughter has even chosen to make her home in Hackney Wick, two minutes from the park.

Andrew Harland is a director at LDA Design and jointly led LDA Design’s work on the Park.

The paving pattern design being tested in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern

© LDA Design

Neil Mattinson A purposeful park

The legacy of London 2012 is the strongest ever delivered by an Olympic Games, anywhere. There are no decaying white elephant venues here, but a Park that welcomes young mothers and the newly retired equally. This is a purposeful landscape, a driver of social and economic change, providing doorstep nature for once neglected areas and catalysing a rebalancing of London – a pull east that continues ten years on.

The creation of the Park was ambitious in myriad ways. It was the first time that new wildflower planting been delivered on such a scale in the UK. Many of the site’s ecological targets have been realised: otters have been sighted; kingfishers are flourishing. This on a site so badly contaminated, it had to be completely stripped and rethought as a riverine park.

For me, the Park has a boldness that you rarely see. That’s its secret. Landscape at this scale – any scale, really – is likely to miss its mark if it is not truly ambitious. You must be confident enough to identify the power in the landscape. It will provide the single, strong, simple idea that will lead everything else – here, it was the River Lea. From there you can build in the new views and make sure it becomes both part of the everyday and is also loved for being special.

The Park was a commission like no other with the ultimate, non-negotiable deadline and the world watching and waiting. A large team of specialists working at breakneck speed and an expert ‘hands on’ client combined to make it the most demanding and most rewarding project of my career, an experience which will stay with me forever.

I believe it moved things on, pioneering new standards in ecology, adaptability, and sustainability, and ensuring landscape architecture was seen as key to unlocking potential. I still get asked to showcase the Park to new clients, and they get it straight away because its power is plain to see.

Neil Mattinson is a director at LDA Design and jointly led LDA Design’s work on the Park.

Landscape masterplanning for the Park aimed to secure a decisive response at a scale to match the infrastructure and the games buildings

© LDA Design

Ben Walker Creating a proper park

My first day in my first job in 2007 was working on what is now Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. How lucky was that? The standout landscape of a generation. It was ‘in at the deep-end’ stuff, but what a wild swim.

The park has been a constant throughout my career. I’m now helping to develop new landscape thinking to transform Carpenter’s Estate, which borders QEOP, working with teenagers and finding out what home, shared spaces and the park means to them.

I learnt so much on this project, and every time I head back, I see the value of the decisions we made over ten years ago. For example, the initial plans for the Olympic Park had overlarge concourses, which we pushed back on to ensure that we could create a generous, enduring green space – a proper park! – whilst making sure it was safe and comfortable for large numbers of people. I’ve taken this learning with me onto other projects such as Battersea Power Station, another at-scale, decade-long LDA Design project where we are creating fabulous new public realm for a formerly cut-off industrial site.

Leading the complex design process for the park positioned landscape architects front and centre. It also put reuse of materials and carbon sequestration at the heart of the design, setting ambitious targets for biodiversity gain that are only now making their way into design standards. Landscape-led design has gained traction because it results in the most remarkable places, and the creation of the park is pivotal to this shift.

Every year, I host a walk around Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park for landscape architecture undergraduates from my alma mater, the University of Edinburgh. Sharing a fraction of what I’ve learnt with students about to embark on their professional lives is a highlight. I can’t help but feel proud, and I can’t help but wonder what they will look back on with a similar sense of pride 10-15 years from now.

Benjamin Walker is a director at LDA Design and London studio lead. Current projects include Carpenter’s Estate and Battersea Power Station.

Model of South Park

© LDA Design

Rob Aspland Working with clay

I’d worked on some complex and challenging projects before the Olympic Park, but this commission was at another level. I remember how tricky the first few months of the project were, because our first contribution to the park design was to challenge assumptions that had long been held about the size of concourse needed and the retention of a stream channel in the north of the park.

We knew that having less concourse (which would only get removed post-Games) and diverting the channel would allow us to create way more park both for the Games and the Legacy modes, and also make more of the river. In hindsight that may sound obvious, but we were working in the context of an early works contract that was already seeing earth moved and bridge abutments built. We had to make the argument with exceptional technical rigour and conviction, working collaboratively with

crowd movement specialists, river and drainage engineers, ecologists, structural engineers and cost consultants to get what we knew to be the best result for the park.

We won those early arguments and developed a design that set new standards in inclusion, habitat creation, and water and waste management. We brought the same technical rigour to dealing with countless technical challenges along the way. Seemingly in stark contrast though, we developed that design of the park using a large-scale working physical model constructed from clay. This malleable, tactile material allowed us to express a playful and sculptural topography that framed views and shaped habitats. What struck me at the time, and which has stayed with me since, was how precision and rigour was the enabler to the sort of creative freedom exemplified by our work with the clay, not the antithesis of it.

Rob Aspland is a director at LDA Design. He is working to transform Westfield Avenue and movement around London’s South Bank.

Stella Bland Vandals or Visionaries?

Our perceptions of place and landscape change with time. Before 2012, a barrage of criticism was unleashed against the folly and vandalism of ‘corporate redevelopment’ of the derelict site in east London for the Olympic Park. Suspicion of change was partnered with nostalgia. But did the critics have a point?

Distrust of grands projets lies deep in the British psyche. Hackney author Ian Sinclair spearheaded the campaign against developing the site with his Ghost Milk, a scorching diatribe on “the long march towards a theme park without a theme”. Protesters believed the whole meaning of the site lay in its past, its post-industrial ruins, so any new place was bound to have no meaning. Sinclair wrote about “wild apple orchards and abandoned forests”. The truth was that the site was so seriously contaminated, very little could be retained. The designers had to focus on delivering for the Games and creating a place for community to thrive. However, the design faced genuine jeopardy, with civil engineering infrastructure dominating and fragmenting the site. What was needed was a step back. When LDA Design was brought in, they argued that the park was too small. The landscape had to make a decisive response at scale, and the River Lea given the prominence it deserved to bring design coherence to the Park. This was the kind of move which Capability Brown might have relished, and his lead was followed in opening and closing views, and in achieving an interaction between monumental architecture and the landscape – a 21st century picturesque.

Those campaigning against developing the site were making a powerful point, however, when they argued for the need to build from small transactions. In other words, build from how people interact with the place – first life, then spaces, then buildings. All grands projets should be rooted in what people want from a site. The idea behind the Olympic Park was to create a sustainable community and bring new opportunity to east London. The emerging East Bank cultural quarter will be a common ground where you don’t have to spend money to feel connected. UCL East has been master planned to be genuinely accessible and useful to local people. The public realm for Here East responds to Hackney Wick’s entrepreneurial nature, with Yard spaces for artists and makers. Whether you are in the mounded, natural north of the park or the ordered, gardenesque south, there is a strong connection between people and place.

Even though the original critics of the Olympic Park longed for a London that might well never have been, to “build from small transactions” remains critically important. It’s this that makes a place lively and inclusive. The power of the park has always been in its social purpose.

Stella Bland is a director of LDA Design and head of communications. She spent six years at CABE, the Government’s advisor on architecture, urban design and public space, where she delivered the UK’s first green infrastructure conference and a festival on low-carbon living.

Lyn Kinnear Stitching the Fringe

The projects that KLA led are stitching the Olympic Fringe Legacy projects together. The design of Marsh Lane, Drapers Field, Abbotts Park and Chobham Academy supported the legacy of increasing access to sport whilst integrating the existing community of Leyton and the new community of the Olympic Park. One of the key design themes of these projects was to increase access to sport through play.

Drapers Field is a particularly strong example of this as we created a revitalised park that has a strong local design identity as well as blurring the boundaries between sport and play. A strong design language of non-territorial and non-age specific play was created though landform and informal play, as well as creating focal points such as a concrete wave that had multiple functions: a skate area, water play and scooter practice for all ages. This was set within an undulating grass surface and new Scots pine glade.

Concrete Waves at Drapers Fields

© KLA

Concrete Waves at Drapers Fields

© KLA

This project was also an opportunity to show how to design an active walk to school from the existing communities of Leyton to the new all-age academy on the North East corner of the Olympic Village. KLA designed the Academy school playground, the new football pitches opposite, the raised alignment of Temple Mills Lane and new bridge, as well as Draper Field Park, and this gave the practice an opportunity to make a new substantial piece of playful city landscape within a grove of pines on the edge of the Lea Valley.

We also used our experience of working with communities to create a focus for positive community cohesion that significantly revitalised a forgotten corner of London and supported London wide initiatives such as reducing childhood obesity.

The creation of the Olympic Park and the leading role that the profession took in its creation gave landscape architecture public visibility.

Lynn Kinnear is principal of KLA and has over 30 years’ experience as a landscape architect working in the urban realm.

View of the Olympic site in May 2022

© jasonhawkes.com