London’s formula for regional growth still works on the Olympic Park

Collaboration between different layers of government, a clear regeneration vision, a spirit of innovation and shrewd public investment can revitalise neglected areas

This article also appears at OnLondon.co.uk, my multi-contributor journalism website about the UK capital which paid subscribers to this personal Substack help support. If you aren’t one already and don’t support OnLondon through a different channel, why not start today? In return, you will get things for your money that other people don’t. Thank you.

This may come as a surprise. But not very long ago, before too many of Britain’s politicians and too much of its media succumbed to, caved in to, or sought to appease forces of populism from both left and right, it was widely-agreed that London was an economic and cultural asset that benefited Britain as a whole.

Yes, the nation’s heavy dependence on its capital city – for output, taxes and global investment – had drawbacks too, and the case for devolving much more power from Whitehall remained strong. Even so, and like it or not, open, dynamic, creative London was the UK’s one and only big urban goose laying golden eggs that helped sustain the whole of the UK. To hate it was to hate your own backyard. To starve it was seen as insanity.

The view that London was a precious source of strength in a globalising world defined the city’s bid to host the triumphant 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. What has become of that spirit?

The empowering of Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn, Mr Brexit and Mr Lexit, is a big part of the reason it has faded. But it lives on in many forms, ranging from the 2012 Games Maker who lives round my way in Hackney, identifiable by the rain jacket she still wears, to the event I attended on Wednesday morning at Here East, the media and innovation complex housed in the two large buildings beside the Lee Navigation Canal that formed the Games-time media centre.

Headlined The Future is Now, it was staged at Plexal, an innovation space promoting tech collaborations, it sought to focus minds on lessons learned from the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park’s successes so far and how to apply them to the still-unfolding legacy of 2012.

They were dubbed “the regeneration games” because the bid was spearheaded by upbeat goals about the infrastructure required for a huge few weeks of sport also driving the renewal of a piece of the capital that had struggled for decades to recover from the decline and disappearance of old Lea Valley industries and the London docks – a “left behind” part of a region otherwise racing ahead.

Games miserabilism became a parallel national theme, one with a lingering legacy of its own, selectively alleging this or that betrayal. It ignores London’s Olympic park being remarkable and unrivalled in repurposing and bequeathing its elite venues for public use and developing, bit by bit, into a varied, connected new part of the city, complete with residential areas, play and relaxation spaces, two business districts, and, in the emerging East Bank, an education and culture cluster as impressive as those of King’s Cross and South Ken.

How much “social value” has it added? Who is benefiting? What has it done for the people of the original Olympic boroughs, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest and Newham?

Arguments about those outcomes continue, not least regarding how to measure them. But the Future Is Now audience heard from James Kaguima, chair of the London Legacy Development Corporation’s Elevate board, about input from local young people and grants for individuals and organisations with educational or community aims.

It heard that 50 per cent of the jobs at the new Sadler’s Wells East dance theatre, which will open its doors in February, will be filled by people who live on or close to the park. It heard from a thriving small business and a UCL East academic about trail-blazing new new products and research.

And Mayor of Newham Rokhsana Fiaz spoke about the opportunities for employment and learning it has provided in a borough where 38 per cent are aged under 25, a strikingly high proportion and rising. East London’s regional growth, much of it centred on Stratford, has given many of them life chances they would not otherwise have had.

Topping the bill were ex-Chancellors George Osborne and Ed Balls. I feared they would be tiresome, but they too had insights to share, underlining that getting the Games project going, winning the bid contest and meeting an unyielding deadline to get the park built, had depended on different layers of government working together, with national, regional and local politicians forsaking silos and sinking differences to play as a team.

Vital backing from Tony Blair’s Labour government was secured despite early scepticism among ministers, much of it rooted in doubts about and dislike for the Mayor of London of that time, Ken Livingstone, who had got elected as an Independent having failed to become Labour’s candidate.

But after sport and culture secretary Tessa Jowell had talked Blair into supporting Livingstone’s Games ambitions, everyone, including the Conservatives bid chair Sebastian Coe, Livingstone’s successor Boris Johnson and the Tory-led government that took power in 2010, would buy into the idea of London as a true “world city” – a welcoming, super-cosmopolitan metropolis as full of promise and potential for the future as it was of pageantry and history.

The Olympic Park story isn’t without its disappointments and woes, its losers as well as its winners. Building the park and making it work needed huge public investment. Views will always vary about the scale and nature of the return secured and the extent to which it has contributed to the long, slow recovery of east London as a whole.

But only the most cynical dismiss the transformation London 2012 has brought about and the formula, combining public and private sectors and political alliances anchored in local knowledge and accountability, that made it work. It emerged in circumstances that were extraordinary and unique. Yet it can work for London again and it can work in other parts of Britain too.

PS: I am the author of the book Olympic Park: When Britain Built Something Big, which talls the story of how the park came to be and draws on interviews with over 50 people closely involved with it. The book available here, here and here.