London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is shaping up and once again inviting the multitudes in - but is it helping to provide the kind of legacy the people of east London were promised?

Some of the starkest images from the financial fall of Greece have been of its 2004 Olympic Games buildings: abandoned stadiums and peeling paint telling tales of broken promises and soured dreams. Whatever else might be said about London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park three years after the 2012 Olympics, it is no tumbleweed vista. The broader issue, though, is whether it is helping to provide the kind of legacy the people of east London were promised.

Certainly the Olympic Park itself – all 560 acres of it – is shaping up, filling out and once again inviting the multitudes in. The London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) – formed shortly before the Games as the planning authority for the park and its environs – claims that, since it started to reopen two years ago, the park has had more than 4m visits. Neale Coleman, LLDC board chairman and Olympics adviser to London mayor Boris Johnson, says that these include “loads and loads of local people. It really is used by the community and it’s going to be even better for them in the future.”

The permanent sports venues have led the way. Last March, Zaha Hadid’s curvaceous aquatics centre, whose soaring construction costs caused much disquiet when it was being built, became a public facility, with entrance prices pegged to local levels. During the same month, the equally striking velodrome – scene of some of Britain’s most memorable medal wins – formally became part of the larger Lee Valley VeloPark, catering for cyclists of all types and abilities.

Compare us with Sydney or Barcelona or Beijing … They’ve all struggled, but we’re on course to do what we said we would Neale Coleman

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The soaring construction costs of Zaha Hadid’s aquatics centre caused much disquiet when it was being built. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

The multi-purpose Copper Box Arena, which hosted handball and other events, had already reopened and is now used by the public and local clubs for an array of indoor sports. Close to it, the former media complex – which for the three weeks of the Games was crammed with journalists and broadcast units – has been renamed as Here East and is to be developed into the digital and creative industry hub always envisaged.

There had been dismay in 2011 when the BBC decided against relocating the EastEnders production operation to Here East from Elstree, and Boris Johnson later came under pressure from within his own ranks to level the site for housing. But BT Sport has become the longed-for glamorous anchor tenant, Loughborough University will set up a postgraduate research centre there, and Hackney Community College will move in to supply apprentices. Commercial tenants are confidently predicted to follow.

Meanwhile, the main Olympic stadium has hosted further leading athletics competitions, with the third-anniversary Games starting tomorrow and featuring 2012 stars Usain Bolt and Mo Farah. The original structure is undergoing a major reconstruction so that it can also become the new home of West Ham United from next August. The conversion costs involved have stirred controversy – £272m, of which the football club will pay just £15m plus annual rent of £2.5m, bringing the final price tag to £702m. But with Rugby World Cup fixtures, community sports days and cultural events to be held there along with Hammers matches, the 54,000-seat bowl seems unlikely to gather dust.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Not enough people want to go up Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit sculpture. Photograph: Paul Thomas/Getty Images

The one fixed feature underperforming so far at the Olympic Park is the ArcelorMittal Orbit, Anish Kapoor’s giant coiling red sculpture: not enough people want to go up it. There are plans to lower the entrance fee and attach a giant slide to the side of it.

Depending on your point of view, all this represents grotesque overindulgence or a commendable exception to the usual Olympics rule, which holds that the showcase infrastructure falls into varying degrees of disuse and grand “legacy” pledges go unfulfilled. For Coleman, the positive interpretation clearly applies. “Never mind Athens, compare us with Sydney or Barcelona or Beijing as well. They’ve all struggled, but we’re on course to do what we said we would, and not just with the park and the venues.”

Before Johnson became mayor, Coleman worked for his predecessor Ken Livingstone and was involved with the Games bid from its conception in 2003. Livingstone and fellow Labour politicians who argued the case for a London Olympics – primarily the then-culture secretary Tessa Jowell, eventually supported by then-prime minister Tony Blair – argued that an Olympics set in the part of the capital that had historically been its poorest would sharply accelerate an economic rebirth that was desperately required by Londoners who had yet to enjoy much obvious benefit from their city’s renewed prosperity since the 1980s.

Livingstone was famously candid. Uninterested in sport and never a big fan of Blair, he characterised the bid as “the only way to get billions of pounds out of the government to develop the East End”. In 2007, when it was announced that the overall Olympic budget had trebled to £9.3bn, he was moved to reassert that the levy he had been raising on London’s council tax-payers to help pay the growing bill represented good value for money – the 38p “bargain” price of a Walnut Whip a week, as he put it, for a Band D household.

[The Olympics bid was] the only way to get billions of pounds out of the government to develop the East End Ken Livingstone

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Olympic Stadium is undergoing a major reconstruction so that it can become the new home of West Ham United from next August. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

The pros and cons of sinking such substantial public funds into one of Europe’s largest regeneration projects can be weighed in many ways but, for Ian Crockford of property developer Lend Lease, it has achieved the legacy goal of drawing investment eastwards. He was project manager of the stadium under the Olympic Delivery Authority, the now defunct body that assembled and cleared the park land and was responsible for the construction of its venues, facilities and infrastructure. Now he is in charge of the creation of a four-million sq ft office area, the International Quarter, beside the Westfield Stratford City shopping centre on the park’s south-eastern fringe.

“The location is its winning point,” Crockford enthuses, listing its strengths: open space, sports facilities, transport links to central London, lots of restaurants and many shops. The mix of park ingredients has shifted over time, with fewer homes than originally planned for its future five new residential neihgbourhoods but with the addition of a culture and education centre, Olympicopolis. This is expected to begin opening from 2019, and will contain new spaces for the V&A museum, Sadler’s Wells, University of the Arts London and discussions are under way to add the first UK branch of the Smithsonian Institution. There will be a new University College London campus, too. “It’s a tremendous mix of uses,” Crockford says. “Think of the synergy we’re going to have with the surroundings. This is why tenants want to come here. It’s so different to other areas of London.”

In the past, politicians had fretted about the park’s setting. It was one thing to point out that the capital’s centre of gravity was moving east – a shift that had been very visible since the rise of Canary Wharf – but another to make the case that this whole new piece of London landscape, half the size of a borough on an unfashionable transition zone between inner and outer London, could be a thriving new business frontier.

The International Quarter looks set to demonstrate that it can. It will become the new home of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and of Transport for London. Given the history of cost concerns about the Games, some may wryly consider the FCA’s appearance on the scene long overdue. But having hefty public sector players on board gives solidity to claims that the development will become London’s fourth office quarter, adding to the big three of the City, the West End and Canary Wharf.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Depending on your point of view, the Olympic legacy represents grotesque overindulgence or a commendable exception. Photograph: Jason Hawkes/Getty Images

But, as always with major regeneration schemes, questions are raised about who really gains. Making an area more attractive tends to have the advertised effect, drawing new people to it with a variety of outcomes. Before it knows it, a down-at-heel neighbourhood is deemed up-and-coming, property prices and rents rise accordingly and the mixed blessings of gentrification follow.

Opposite flanks of the park illustrate well this fluid blend of continuity and change. A southbound towpath walk along the River Lea Navigation Canal down the west side of the park takes you past Here East and then, further on, on the opposite bank, Hackney Wick’s White Building, which is sold as “London’s centre for art, technology and sustainability” and “an incubator for discursive and innovative thought”, no less. It’s all craft beer, bicycles and beards.

By contrast, on the forecourt of the Westfield mall and the teeming bus and rail transport hub, a strong flavour of pre-Olympic Stratford survives: homelessness campaigners, vendors of The Watchtower, a bow-tied citizen of the Nation of Islam. Cross the road and the old indoor shopping centre seems still very much alive, with its market stalls and Shoe Zone and second-hand jewellery. Emerge on to the Broadway on the other side and there’s the Old Town Hall, where Newham’s executive mayor Sir Robin Wales says: “The government has walked away from legacy. We’ve been given some of the biggest cuts in the country, as have Tower Hamlets and Hackney. So that’s masses of money taken out of the East End.”

Newham encompasses a territory bordered by the Thames to the south that’s seen its past fortunes ebb and flow with those of London’s docks, and it endured devastation during the war. Its growing population of over 300,000 is one of Britain’s youngest and poorest. Unemployment rates are high, as are those for ill health and premature death. Resentment of “rich London” gets a reality check here.

The government has walked away from legacy. We’ve been given some of the biggest cuts in the country … Sir Robin Wales

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Making an area more attractive means property prices and rents rise accordingly and the mixed blessings of gentrification follow. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

Along with its fellow “growth boroughs” Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Greenwich, Waltham Forest and Barking and Dagenham (formerly called the “Olympic boroughs”), Newham is pursuing the 20-year goal of “convergence” with the rest of London in terms of social mix and life chances. According to the latest figures, the six as a whole are on course as measured by 12 out of 21 indicators, but are falling short on nine.

The data does not disclose if the positive changes show things are improving for longstanding residents or a reflection of more affluent people moving in. Wales makes no bones about desiring a larger middle class – “I want them in the schools saying, ‘This isn’t bloody good enough!’” – but he’s long been concerned about losing the home-grown variety through population churn, with locals who get on in life then moving out. He is encouraged that Newham’s local household panel survey suggests this is slowing down.

Wales subscribes to the concept of “resilience” and building it into Newham’s economy, communities and individual residents, equipping them to cope with disadvantage and to better take advantage of new opportunities generated by legacy-fuelled change. Newham has programmes for improving English skills in a borough where over 200 languages and dialects are spoken. Its schoolchildren in years five, six and seven have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument free of charge, the borough believing this pays dividends in terms of wider intellectual development. Wales is immensely proud of Workplace, the borough’s own job brokerage that pro-actively connects unemployed residents with local employers. “We’ve got over 26,000 into work,” he says, “and 4,500 last year.”

Like many other London borough leaders, especially Labour ones, Wales is exploring new ways of getting homes built for Newham residents and protecting what he has. As the price of buying and private renting soars – house-price inflation in neighbourhoods such as Manor Park and Forest Gate has been among the highest in London – Newham is seeking to exploit the borough’s own land assets commercially. A council-owned company called Red Door Ventures has begun building more than 3,000 homes for local people for private rental on council-owned land. Some of the rents will be subsidised, and will generate a long-term income stream for future reinvestment in sub-market-priced homes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The capital’s centre of gravity is moving east and this whole new piece of London landscape has potential to be a thriving new business frontier. Photograph: Kevin Allen

Meanwhile, Newham has been endeavouring to shift some of its stock into partnerships with housing associations to put it beyond the reach of Right to Buy, though if the new government implements its policy of extending the right to housing association tenants – a policy even a senior representative of London big business has described as “bonkers” – it might prove futile.

Housing policy in Newham has attracted some uncomfortable media coverage, including over the plans to redevelop the 23-acre Carpenters estate, which stands right next to the Olympic Park. Since 2007, the borough has been moving residents out, triggering opposition from some leaseholders and tenants and enabling a recent, highly publicised, occupation by a group of single mothers who moved into four boarded up Carpenters flats after the council and their housing-association landlord decided they were ready to move from the Focus E15 Foyer hostel. Wales has expressed some regrets over that episode, but remains adamant that the Carpenters land can and will be put to better use.

“We’re going to build thousands more homes there and we’re going to get jobs there. If you want us to build more homes that people can afford, we’re going to have to move some people from our brownfield sites for the greater good.”

Defining what that means and how best to pursue it in the paradoxical London context of booming growth and grinding austerity is as much a part of the Olympic legacy as the Olympic Park itself.

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