By Andrew Harland, partner at LDA Design
The London 2012 Olympic Park, now named the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, is Europe’s most significant landscape in over 150 years, creating 102ha of much-needed new parkland, and forming the centrepiece of the world’s most sustainable Olympic Games to date.
LDA Design and Hargreaves Associates led the masterplanning and detailed design of the parklands and public realm. Fundamentally, the design approach taken demonstrates how a bigger vision for green infrastructure in a world-class city like London can be the principal driver for regeneration, creation of value and meeting low carbon targets. It also demonstrates the central role that landscape architects, as master planners and designers, can play in leading the process.
As the largest new urban park in the capital since the Victorian era, it has acted and continues to be a major catalyst for the regeneration of East London. Thanks to its legacy, new communities are being built with the provision of housing accommodation, leisure and retail space.
Created over four years, work on the park included: extensive demolition and the decontamination of nearly two million tonnes of soil (the largest ever soil-washing operation in the UK); the creation of vast areas of concourse, spectator lawns and landscape features like the London 2012 Gardens and Great British Garden; the largest wildflower meadow ever planted in the UK; more than 4,000 semi-mature trees planted; and wetland planting on a massive scale with more than 300,000 plants..
Influencing the Olympic Park
The Olympic Park is not the first of its type and reflects ideas that LDA Design developed during the previous decade, most notably at Gunpowder Park in Essex and Northala Fields in Northolt. Both projects included strategies for minimising the use of resources by using recycled materials in construction; the use of sub-soil rather than topsoil as a growing medium; the creation of diverse habitats on post-industrial substrate; strategies for land remediation to create habitat-rich parkland; sustainable drainage strategies; and the use of recycled concrete in gabions as a building material. These schemes informed the sustainable design strategies of the Olympic Park, which pushed the boundaries a step further.
Designing for sustainability
Sustainability was not just integral to the design, but also to the venues, facilities, operations and infrastructure for the Games. In making the 2012 Olympic Games the greenest ever, the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) set itself and its contractors working on the park a range of targets that were embedded in systems, processes, tools and the culture of the project.
Here are some of the results:
- Demolished materials were re-used with 98% of existing site material being recycled within the park;
- Over a million cubic metres of soil was cleaned on site in ‘soil hospitals’, saving 90,000 truck movements off-site;
- Approximately 100ha of open space was designed to reduce the risk of flooding in the river valley and enrich the biodiversity of the area – removing 5,500 homes from the ‘At Risk’ Register.
Achieving biodiversity
We worked closely with ecologists, planners and landscape engineers to achieve workable and effective solutions in what was and is a challenging and high-profile setting.
New habitats were created, comprising wet and dry woodland, species-rich grasslands and meadows, brownfield habitats reflecting the urban past, ponds, reedbeds and marsh. Specific habitat features or wildlife installations support key species identified in the Olympic Park Biodiversity Action Plan including among others, otter, kingfisher, water vole, bats, swifts, sand martins, amphibians, reptiles and a range of invertebrates. Species have also been relocated, including birds, bats and lizards; and more than 650 bird and bat boxes were installed.
The previously canalised River Lee has also been transformed into a three dimensional mosaic of wetland, swales, wet woodland, dry woodland and meadow, together forming an absorbent flood-control measure and ensuring that no spoil has had to be removed.
Creating the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and the London 2012 Legacy
Whilst the Games has made an important and high-profile contribution to the sustainability of the Olympic Park, by far the greatest benefit to sustainable living will come through the extensive transformation of the Olympic site as part of the Legacy phase. The strategy for transformation has been remove-connect-complete to leave a fully functioning park that makes a massive contribution to the local community.
Remove – the removal of temporary venues, and substantial infrastructure that supported the venues and accommodated large visitor numbers.
Connect – an extensive new pedestrian, cycleway and road network will be introduced following the removal of 16km of security fence around the site, connecting existing communities around the Olympic Park. It will be easy to walk or cycle from Waltham Forest to Tower Hamlets or Hackney to Newham, which was not possible before the Olympic project.
Complete – the transformation of the site in preparation for Legacy is on a dramatic scale. With a budget of £292 M, an area of parkland the same size as that created for the Games will be delivered in one third of the time. It will be the centrepiece of a major new sustainable community including 8,000 new homes supported by twelve new schools, three health centres and a new library. There will also be 8,000 new jobs created in an extensive new commercial district. There will be extensive leisure and sporting facilities including five venues retained from the Games, complemented by extensive additional parkland. This will create the best environment to live, work and play, benefitting not only residents living on the Park but communities surrounding it as well.
Within the Park, initiatives to substantially extend habitat to deliver more than the 45ha required by the planning process, include: more bird and bat boxes; substantial new habitat types; meadows created for the Games will be converted to species-rich perennial meadows of greater habitat value; all the lawns, either new or existing, will be species rich, not just grass, which will be of particular value to invertebrates; and there will be a significant increase in the area of wet woodland – which is believed to be the largest area of artificially created wet woodland in a park in the UK.
A sustainable park needs to be managed and a strong programme of activity is being put in place to ensure this is effective. Central to success will be the park hub buildings, one in the North Park and another in the South Park, which will provide a base for onsite park management, first aid and toilet facilities, retail, cafés and restaurants, community rooms and a large play area. This infrastructure will also support the activity programme within each area of the Park ranging from small-scale local events to cycle hire.
The Park has been designed to offer a wide variety of different types of spaces, in turn allowing the widest range of activity to occur and to be as inclusive as possible. This includes accessibility standards that exceed the norm, created by the design team in collaboration with the Built Environment Access Panel. The result is a park that leaves a lasting social, economic and environmental legacy for London and the UK.
Impact on future schemes
The experience gained from the Olympic Park has already influenced many of our projects. Most notable is Gorky Park – a historic 300- acre (120 ha) park in Moscow which will be transformed into an emblem of Moscow and a multi-functioning park to rival Central Park in New York or Hyde Park in London.
We have taken an approach that respects the park’s extensive history, while at the same time modernising it and bringing a new vitality that makes it a major cultural focus for the city and a top destination for Muscovites. As another sustainable park, it will have management and maintenance at its heart as well as activities and services to attract visitors in the years to come.
