For six weeks in the summer of 2012, the London Olympic and Paralympic Games proved undeniably that the United Kingdom could deliver a global event that was safe, on time and entertaining.
Never mind the years of fierce political infighting, the fraught jostling for commercial contracts or the fretting over the cost to the taxpayer, the United Kingdom basked in the knowledge that it could build and host with the best. And the athletes did pretty well, too.
Pretty much as soon as the last competitor had waved goodbye to the Athletes' Village, questions started to be asked about the lasting impact of the Games and the promised regeneration. The answers are only now becoming clear and they provide lessons for Paris as it prepares to launch its 2024 Games, and Los Angeles, which will take on the mantle in four years' time.
The political promise was always that the Olympics would accelerate long-running plans to help London grow to east into its poorest areas, via major infrastructure, transport and real estate improvements. The ultimate success of any Games is always partly whether the real estate left behind is thriving or not.
To a degree every decision made was a redevelopment decision, with an overriding mission to use the infrastructure and real estate brought by the Olympics to bring standards of living in east London into line with the rest of the capital. The word "convergence" was coined by those in charge to describe the initiative.
A good place to start to understand whether this worked is on foot with your eyes open. Twelve years on, the London Olympic Park, renamed the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, has replaced 560 acres of knotty, brownfield industrial land in a gritty part of the capital with a world-class sports, entertainment and cultural hub visited by millions a year.
The park is home to six permanent sports and leisure venues open to the public, made from former Olympic venues on the doorstep of one of the best-connected transport hubs in the capital.
There are now 12,000 homes spread across a series of residential areas in place of the homes of 500 tenants at Clays Lane that were cleared to make way for the Games, surrounded by 30 acres of woodland, six miles of rivers and canals, and 10 hotels.
In some ways, the stand-out development is only just fully opening. That is the cultural hub on the River Lea in the heart of the site, which will house the BBC Music Studios, a new home for the broadcaster's Symphony Orchestra, Chorus and the BBC Singers, and much of the Victoria and Albert Museum's archive. Several other prestigious arts groups and universities will be based here too.
And one of the most interesting post-Olympics areas is Here East, which was the press and media hub for the Games, but was retrofitted to become a technology and studio core for the likes of television channels Channel 5 and BT Sport, and Loughborough University.
All of this has brought millions of visitors a year to a previously under-the-radar part of the country. And not just to the site, but the surrounding areas too.
Headline grabbing has been the £50 million purpose-built arena at nearby Pudding Mill that houses Swedish pop group Abba's Voyage high-tech production. The Evening Standard recently reported that the packed-out show contributed £332.6 million in spending and £177.7 million in extra economic activity in the area in its first year. Not bad for a meanwhile use before the area becomes the fifth residential area built after the Games.
The story of how this has happened, the major successes and the contentious failures, is well worth the telling.
Sir Hugh Robertson, chair of the British Olympic Association, describes the park as an exemplar of how sport can be "used to regenerate an area and how it can be integrated in people's lives" to their benefit.
Brian Donnelly, development director at Lendlease, the Australian group behind the original Athletes' Village and the park's major office district Stratford Cross, said what has emerged is a "well-loved park that is the largest to be done in Europe" in 150 years.
He adds: "I have worked in five cities on four continents. I have been in this particular role for two years and through that time I constantly take people around the park as people want to understand how London did it. It really is a benchmark as to how you do post-Olympics regeneration and many of the other host cities have not got anywhere near it on those terms. And it's now getting a second wind."
Value for Money?
The bid committee pledged an economic windfall, new, affordable homes and venues filled after the Games with thriving operators. Crucially, it also promised value for money for the taxpayer.
In the lead-up to the Games, the cost became a major bone of contention, as private sector investors knocked by the global financial crisis looked to reduce the amounts on their balance sheets earmarked for major projects.
Estimates of the public sector investment needed to plug these gaps for venues such as the athletics stadium and the Athletes' Village are much disputed, but a number of media reports in the intervening years put it at £11 billion. A government report published in 2013 said that the boost to tourism, construction and trade would generate up to £41 billion by 2030.
The London Legacy Development Corporation, the mayoral development corporation set up to oversee the development and take ultimate ownership of the land, puts the public sector investment figure at £9 billion and said the gross value add to London's economy has returned this already several times over.
The Olympic Stadium cost the taxpayer an estimated £486 million to build, plus, in a criticized move, more than £323 million to convert for Premier League football club West Ham United so it did not stand empty. The club contributed around £15 million towards the work and pays £2.5 million a year in rent. The rest came mostly from the taxpayer.
A leading football club playing in the park's most iconic venue has removed one of the biggest headaches for all host cities, making sure the athletics stadium is used regularly afterwards.
The LLDC points out that the stadium generates a lot of revenue from other sports, too. It said the World Athletics Championships in 2017 generated £107 million, while Major League Baseball matches have delivered hundreds of millions of pounds in revenue. This month, the Foo Fighters were the latest major rock band to fill it.
Rosanna Lawes, the executive director of development at the LLDC, said: "At the London Stadium we have just hosted the MLB series which was buzzing, and we generated £53 million from MLB games there in 2023. And of course we have been returning land value on development sites elsewhere on the Park. That return we make helps support the investment return to Londoners and to taxpayers. East Bank is a fantastic example," she adds.
East Bank is the most ambitious cultural project in London since the South Bank in the 1950s, built on the back of £600 million of investment from the Mayor of London and central government. It is only now emerging as the biggest catalyst for economic growth in the area but has already generated billions in inward investment.
East Bank was built partly on the site of what was Europe's largest fridge "mountain" of scrapped appliances, and originally set aside for residential. The ambition was ratcheted up in 2012 when the masterplan was changed to propose a cultural hub. It has subsequently attracted a number of heavyweights: the Victoria and Albert, the world-famous museum of decorative arts, is planning Victoria & Albert East and the V&A Storehouse, a hub for its archival material that can't be displayed at its Kensington home due to lack of space. Speculation has it items about to go on show include David Bowie's meticulously created stage outfits.
The BBC is relocating its BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Chorus and the BBC Singers, with studios and performance spaces. Dance theatre and school Sadler's Wells will have a 550-seat theatre and six studios, billed as Sadler's Wells East, while the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London and University College, London are bringing a buzz to the area.
"When it was originally pulled together in the masterplan we never dreamed it would bring the likes of the Victoria and Albert [Museum], Sadler's Wells, University of Arts London, the BBC to the park. What that means is billions of eyeballs on the park drawn to those institutions," Lawes said. "And it means high-skilled jobs in the education and culture districts at the park. East Bank has produced a return on investment of £1.5 billion of economic value back into the local economy with an additional 1.5 million projected visitors and 2,500 jobs."
Lawes said over the last 10 years, East Bank has created more than 5,800 construction jobs and reclaimed over 17,000 square metres of brownfield land.
Lendlease's Donnelly said as the tenants move into East Bank it is changing the types of occupiers his company will target at the Turing building. It is close to delivering this latest 350,000-square-foot building at its giant office campus Stratford Cross, with its 50:50 joint venture partner, Canada's CPP Investments, and is now looking at creative and educational tenants after the success of East Bank.
On that basis, with 5,500 jobs already plugged in at Here East, and 25,000 in the offices at Stratford Cross, and thousands more coming at East Bank, the pledge of tens of thousands of new jobs has been met. However, according to Newham Council, unemployment in the borough is running at 6.9%, well over the 4.4% average for England.
Stafford Lancaster, chief investment officer at Delancey, the part-owner of Here East, which is the former press hub, and the former athletes' village, East Village, said while investors needed to be committed to the regeneration, patience was always going to pay off: "From the beginning, it was clear that the UK government wanted a partner at the Olympic Park who didn’t think of returns as purely financial aspects but someone who was committed to clear community, social and environmental returns.
"That is not to say that our investments at East Village and Here East have not been financially successful. Whilst we can’t disclose financial figures, we remain confident in our original investment thesis of aligning our long-term client fund capital with UK government delivery of exemplar infrastructure and assets which has proven to be a successful combination. We’ve been invested for 10 years and we’ve delivered strong performance over that period across all aspects."
At the Olympic Park this year, as well as West Ham and Major League Baseball, visitors will come to see the London Lions professional basketball team and London Pulse netball club at the Copper Box Arena, the 7,000-seat venue that was home to handball, goalball, fencing and modern Pentathlon at the London 2012 Games. It now also hosts boxing matches and concerts.
The British Swimming Championships takes place at the London Aquatics Centre. The Lee Valley VeloPark, Hockey and Tennis Centre has hosted the Women's Hockey Cup and the Wheelchair Tennis Masters. The sporting venues, then, are well used. A more qualified success has been the ArcelorMittal Orbit, which includes the world's longest and tallest tunnel slide, but has never entirely taken off.
The Offices and Retail Lessons
If anything the commercial districts, retail, offices and leisure, have proven more successful.
One of the first commercial success stories was the Westfield-developed Stratford City shopping centre. A major mall next to the station, dreamed up by developer Chelsfield, had been battled over long before the Olympic bid was decided, ever since a high-speed rail link and Eurostar station had been earmarked for the area more than a decade before. The failure of the Eurostar train to France to board at Stratford is one of the notable misses by the project.
The story of how Australian developer Westfield emerged victorious ahead of the Reuben Brothers, Multiplex and Stanhope to buy the mall site in 2005 is the stuff of commercial property legend. Within a couple of years it was proving a Pyrrhic victory as the group had to plough massive investment into the shopping centre and transport infrastructure as a global financial crisis raged, and led it to delay other projects. The thing about the Olympic Games is the date does not move and once you have committed, you really have to deliver.
Lynne Garner, the LLDC chief executive, puts it starkly: "Westfield Stratford City, for example, in the wake of the 2008 crash would have been put on hold if there had been no Olympics in prospect."
To its credit, when the Games started, Westfield's mega-mall opened on time.
It underscores the importance of the long-term view that joint venture ownership of the Olympics land with government bodies has provided. In this case that was London & Continental Railways, which owned the high-speed rail link land. LCR and the LLDC have given private sector partners such as Westfield the confidence to continue, while keeping them honest.
When the Games began, John Burton, who oversaw the development for Westfield, told CoStar News the event had brought 400,000-plus people a day to the mall and in doing so helped convince people that the overall project provided the perfect blend of both private and public investment. He said with some justification: “The investment we put up has helped to convince others to invest."
The shopping hub quickly cemented its position as one of the two most popular malls in Europe in terms of footfall, alongside the company's Westfield London. It notably did so without decimating the nearby Stratford shopping area, which has survived because of its complementary local residential area offer.
Retrofitting Right
The 1-million-square-foot media hub and international broadcast core had seemed from the outset the most difficult venue in terms of finding an alternative use, but it has proved a successful example of retrofitting.
The original Allies & Morrison-designed hub for the Games was essentially two large sheds: the 550,000-square foot International Broadcast Centre and the 330,000-square-foot media and press hub. They were developed to house a massive amount of mechanical and electrical equipment, offices, studios and a 700-seat press conference auditorium, crossed at their northern ends by a multifloor car park.
But the plans from the outset were left flexible enough to be retrofitted to mimic Hackney Wick’s warehouses and incorporate "state-of-the-art technology" to woo tech start-ups away from nearby Shoreditch and Old Street's Silicon Roundabout.
The Media and Press Centre was designed to be later used as office space from the outset, but the International Broadcast Centre had been originally intended as temporary. Post-Games, Hawkins/Brown was appointed architect and drew up plans to keep the structural core and then wrap the windowless building with a 16m-wide layer of studio and retail space, and a glass facade.
What emerged was a retrofit that created a 350,000-square-foot innovation area and office building, a 1,000-seat auditorium, and a 650,000-square-foot education space hosting broadcast studios and a state-of-the-art data hub. It was finished in 2016 and tenants now include: BT Sport; Sports Interactive; Staffordshire University London; Loughborough University, London; University College London, Scope; and Ford Mobility.
Delancey's Lancaster said the group's experience of bringing forward the development, which he added could have easily become forgotten infrastructure, and the Athletes' Village, now East Village, has seen the most difficult-to-repurpose sites on the park eventually thrive.
"Working in partnership with Qatari Diar, and with local and national government, after the Games, we worked to deliver what is now East Village, a highly sustainable, and award-winning, residential, and commercial district, which was designed from the outset to build upon the post-Games legacy and provide quantitative social value benefits across East London."
The village has been owned and operated by Get Living since 2013, after being delivered by the government. It includes 131,140 square feet of commercial which is home to over 30, mostly independent, retailers.
Stafford points out that new and affordable housing, housing that is in some way funded to make it more affordable, is still being developed at East Village. Get Living recently completed and handed over 48 new affordable homes to the housing association Notting Hill Genesis, as well as a thousand new rental homes with the delivery of Victory Plaza in 2019 and Portlands Place in 2022.
He said the 6,500 residents are a diverse mix. "Get Living has a strong student and young professional contingent, as well as families and some retirees, working in a broad range of occupations, from the NHS to the financial sector. "
The Office Campus
Lendlease is continuing to build at Stratford Cross, or "International Quarter" as it was formerly known. Its planning consent is for 2.57 million square feet of offices, 683 apartments and 90,000 square feet of retail with the future offices to be delivered in a 50:50 joint venture with CPP Investments.
Development director Donnelly said around half of the development has been completed, including around 1.2 million square feet of offices. "The first phase was about focusing on large organisations," he said, pointing to occupiers including government body Transport for London, the LLDC itself, the Financial Conduct Authority, Unicef and charity Cancer Research UK.
He describes the Turing Building, the 350,000-square-feet speculative office completed with CPP that will be finished in the fourth quarter, as an inflexion point as it coincides with the opening of the cultural buildings at East Bank next door. "We are an interesting connective tissue between Westfield's mall and East Bank and, really, the name change to Stratford Cross was about putting Stratford front and centre."
Felicity Ranger, office leasing manager at Lendlease, said the likely occupier mix is being turned on its head by its new neighbours.
"When you have had that government investment in East Bank and the moves of UCL and University of the Arts, London, you see how different the place is now, in a similar way to how the vibe changed when Central Saint Martins [an art and fashion college] opened in King's Cross."
"We are between early and mid-stage conversations [on letting] with organisations and there is more signs of the ecosystem changing," Donnelly said. "Importantly we worked with LLDC to ensure around 200,000 square feet of the building could be allocated to education if a large university or college comes along."
In terms of rents Donnelly said Stratford is seeing increases. "Historically Stratford has always appealed to the value end of the occupier mix against central London. I think we will still be in the value side of it but the higher levels of amenity we are producing is changing things. In this building we are reserving the top floor as a shared amenity floor for all occupiers."
That said, Lendlease is reducing its financial commitment to its UK projects, it announced recently in a major strategic update. Donnelly said: "We are committed with CPP Investments to Stratford Cross. But it is important to recognise that Lendlease has funded most of its development off its balance sheets with 100% equity in the UK. But if you look at other markets, for instance Sydney and Melbourne, we would do it through forward funds. So here we would look to bring in other partners in future and there are a few different ways it might play out, with forward funds and more in the build-to-suit part of the market."
Lendlease is also preparing to lodge plans for another 340,000-square-foot office, called S10. "Stratford has matured and it gives us confidence and so, too, has something globally renowned like Abba Voyage coming to the area. If you were looking to create a playbook for how to do a successful post-Olympics host city legacy, then this is it."
Donnelly said there are plenty of lessons for Paris from his time overseeing the office development at Stratford. "Olympic legacy development involves getting the fundamentals right, most notably public transport," he said. "With first the high-speed connection into King's Cross and then the Elizabeth line people are staggered by the way you can travel around the City, for instance from Liverpool Street to Stratford in eight minutes flat. The benefits of living and working with the park on your doorstep too is basically intangible but huge, particularly as cities become denser."
Housing Matters
Traditionally a poorer area, the amount, affordability and quality of housing the Olympics would bring to East London was another key plank of its bid commitment.
In the immediate aftermath of the Games, research from CBRE on rental growth was very positive for investors. Newham had shown the largest increase in average rents across all London boroughs over the preceding year. Average rents rose by 39% to nearly £1,700 per month. The borough came ahead of the City of London, which recorded strong growth of nearly 32%, partly reflecting a small number of exclusive new penthouses, which raised the overall average.
But has that trajectory continued and were the ordinary folk of Stratford priced out of the area as it became a commuter enclave for workers in the West End and Canary Wharf?
World Athletics President Sebastian Coe, who headed the London Olympics bid, promised 30,000 to 40,000 new homes in and around the Olympic Park, much of which would be affordable and aimed at nurses, teachers and other key workers. So far nowhere near that amount has been built on the Olympic Park, and around 39% are deemed affordable according to government formulas.
But many more are in the pipeline. The LLDC points out that once nearby new homes are factored in, the Olympics should have finished 33,000 new homes by 2036 with an average 35% of these affordable.
And of the homes on the development permitted by LLDC since 2016 and coming down the tracks, at the development sites Stratford Waterfront, Pudding Mill, Rick Roberts Way, Aquatics Triangle and Chobham Farm, all are 50% affordable. Within this 26 zero-carbon exemplar homes have been built at Chobham Manor, while four new schools have been built on or near the Park.
The amount of affordable housing varies by development, in some sites half the homes are aimed at first-time buyers and young renters, in others there are almost none. And the housing need in the area remains high, with some 34,000 households on the waiting list in the Newham Council area, which covers most of the park.
The LLDC's Garner said every affordable home is earmarked for people on the housing lists of the local boroughs: Newham, Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest. Disabled living accommodation is offered London-wide, though to local people first. And when it comes to private buying or renting the developments on the park it said 80% of those residents moved there from other parts of east London. That is a much more local market than most new-build developments in the capital, Garner said.
But she added it is disingenuous not to admit the challenge of "truly affordable homes" at social rent levels, because this remains a challenge across London. "The truth is that until we as a nation grasp the importance of providing low-cost rented accommodation to those who clearly need it and hence put more and longer term funding into the system, then we will continue to see this dilemma playing out."
The LLDC's Lawes said political leadership has been helpful as it moves closer to meeting its targets for housing, and the Olympics zone has moved with the affordable housing parameters set by the Greater London Authority.
"Our initial objective was 35% affordable and all of the early part of schemes delivered that. When Sadiq Khan as mayor changed this objective from 35% to 50%, we set about delivering on that and on the balance of our sites on a portfolio approach we are delivering against mayoral policy, and that is across a range of tenures, shared ownership and truly affordable homes."
Lawes added: "We have had cross-party support from national government, mayors and local boroughs. All were invested in the success of the Games and the legacy and that political alignment continues. You just work through market cycles and political change."
She said the success of the regeneration has allowed the LLDC to slowly change its relationships with the private sector to make them increasingly work as a traditional 50:50 joint venture.
"How we structure transactions with the market is we leverage our interest in the land. We have wanted to demonstrate commitment and we put in place agreements that shared risk. We did not take a significant return up front but took a percentage of the sales values when homes were sold. We have continued with that model, but more recently changed to joint ventures on a 50:50 basis where we put 50% of the equity into those transactions. We have done that with Ballymore at Stratford Waterfront and at Bridgewater Triangle."
Lawes said the objective is to make sure nominations for housing rest with the boroughs to make sure they are the ones leading on this, not the LLDC. "Our other objective is to make sure homes are available to all Londoners. For instance at the Chobham neighbourhood 70% of the residents are families as the design is very much for families."
Donnelly said Lendlease brought critical lessons from the work it had done at the Sydney Games to ensure the construction of an Athletes' Village that could easily be retrofitted the Games while retaining the original structure. The Athletes' Village is now the East Village, with the 2,818 apartments for the competitors brought back providing homes split evenly between private rentals and affordable housing.
"The Athletes' Village in London was designed for athletes and retrofitted afterwards for housing," Donnelly said. "You focus on how a building can be one thing and then think about what it can be afterwards. The hard thing to move is the embodied carbon targets and novel approaches to retaining structures and adaptive reuse allowed us to do that."
Convergence Achieved?
Guiding all of this development was the principle that it would lead to "convergence" and, rather than rewarding a bunch of interlopers, the shiny new buildings would give back to the locals by improving their quality of life so it was in line with the rest of the capital.
The then-Olympic Park Legacy Company, now the London Legacy Development Corporation, and the five host boroughs adopted the word “convergence” as an umbrella term for a series of goals.
The plan was for the five boroughs, Greenwich (south of the river and hosting equestrian and gymnastics events), Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest, to reach average London living standards by 2030, or to converge.
The London Legacy Development Corporation took ownership of the freehold and has managed an estate similar in scope and size to the other great London estates such as Grosvenor and Cadogan, which are owned by dukes and earls, but with convergence at the forefront for the first time.
Michelle May, head of regeneration at the London Legacy Development Corporation, who is an east Londoner, and one of the architects of the convergence plans, said 12 years on seems a reasonable time to reflect on how successful this has been: "It's sort of a halfway point."
The LLDC commissioned a review in 2022 by consultancy PRD to consider how close the boroughs are to convergence. It showed population, business and employment growth have been above the London average since 2010. The percentage of people educated to degree level, school attainment and people with no qualifications have all converged with the London average and so has the number of people in work. But systemic problems such as crime and health have seen little movement.
"In all key areas that we had committed to as a partnership led by the Boroughs and endorsed by the Mayor of London and national government the latest census data demonstrates significant success," May saif. "That is in terms of growth of the population, employment growth, economic growth, educational attainment. A big gap has narrowed. More people in the Boroughs are in work and absolute numbers separating the areas from elsewhere in the capital have fallen."
But May agrees there are complex areas that are yet to be fully understood: "The LLDC and PRD are looking at convergence in a more nuanced way with the help of UCL. Rather than just focusing on in work stats and higher educational qualifications for instance we are working with University College London on questions around 'do individuals feel life is better now?' and 'are people more secure in their livelihoods?'."
May added "but still that focus on convergence has served us well. It gave us a focus and a shared narrative and helpful indicators to measure, a long-term ambition with clear milestones. Now it is about looking deeper into communities that are still underserved and under-represented."
May said "convergence" was also important because "government buy-in" was received.
"It was easy to understand the principle. It was whittled down from an initial 18 themes including health, crime, life expectancy after we realised we will not achieve all of this. It let us prioritise things that could move the dial and jobs became a really big part of that."
The formation of the public sector LLDC to act as estate manager, gifted the land used for the Olympics, is one of the critical decisions made at the outset, something Lendlease's Donnelly said has enabled London to be a benchmark for other host cities.
May said LLDC was able to control quality as well as guaranteeing regeneration benefits.
"For anything we directly control as LLDC, as landlord, contracting authority and planning authority, we embed a commitment to local employment and good growth.
"From the start we demanded as a minimum the London living wage. It was quite out there at first but when you contract to be the operator in our venues, you commit to paying that as well as to recruiting local people and we audit that on an annual basis. The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is effectively a London living wage zone.
"There has been a big focus on apprentices as well and building long-term relationships with the people and businesses at the park as we are set up to be in it for the long-term. We made a conscious decision to go to market with a clear position that we wanted to use development platforms to deliver socioeconomic priorities and said if that is not part of your proposal you will not win, and then we enter into a partnership proposal with those deliverers and work alongside them."
The Legacy
Whether the Olympic spirit, that sense that the United Kingdom really could get big projects completed on time and successfully, has been the legacy of the Games is a more moot point.
There have been some big successes, no doubt aided by the confidence and lessons learned from the Olympics, such as the Elizabeth line linking East to West London, or the Battersea Power Station regeneration. Equally, the wrangling that has seen some of the HS2 high-speed rail project kicked into the long grass for instance, has suggested little has changed. As for the political atmosphere in the UK, and its impact on public and private sector relations, the less said probably the better.
And yet, on most promises the London 2012 Olympics is close to meeting its targets and has often surpassed them.
The LLDC said well over 100,000 jobs have been created across the host boroughs since 2012, more than one million people have visited the Olympic Park every year, and of the 70,000 London 2012 Games Makers, over 35,000 continue to volunteer in their communities.
As the LLDC's May argues: "Stratford has become a destination that is well and truly on the map and that has really helped with perceptions of the area. It all worked really, the story of London and its diversity worked, and people want to stay here too once they come. As someone local, you can't put a price on that."
Paris and Los Angeles will of course do things their own way, but there is plenty to learn from London's Olympic Games.