To Paul Amusi, this seemed like a life-changing opportunity. He was 16 and living in a temporary apartment with his mother and three siblings after his parents divorced. East London, where he lived, Newham, was home to some of the most needy and overcrowded wards in the country. It was now proposed as the location of the Olympic Village in London’s bid to host the 2012 Games.
As a politically active student at St. Bonaventure School, just east of the site, Amusier joined local campaigns to reduce street violence after a series of local stabbings, earning his place as an ambassador on the council’s young mayor’s team. When the Olympic bid was announced in 2003, he focused all his energy on boosting local support for the Games, based on the fact that it would bring jobs, safer streets and a chance that one day someone like him would hire or even buy their own home. “It’s not going to be just a sporting event, with developers making a lot of money,” Amusi told me. – It was about our future.
When London won the offer in July 2005, its supporters called it an innovative moment. Previous Olympics have done so much damage to host cities, leaving behind useless places, unleashing property speculation and social displacement. But London’s offer was different. He promised to be a “model for social inclusion”. His legacy will be “the regeneration of the area for the direct benefit of everyone who lives there.” Sebastian Coe, chairman of the London organizing committee, promised that regenerating the area in and around the Olympic Park would result in 30,000-40,000 new homes, many of which would be “affordable housing” available to key workers as nurses. or teachers. “
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Ten years after the patriotic competition that brought the nation together to enjoy director Danny Boyle’s inauguration ceremony, with its pastoral vision of merry England and NHS nurses, only 13,000 homes have been built on and around the Olympic site. Of these, only 11% are really accessible to middle-income people. Meanwhile, in the four neighborhoods located in the area – Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Waltham Forest – there are almost 75,000 households on the waiting list for municipal housing, many of whom live in desperate poverty. Thousands of former residents have also been relocated outside the area since the Olympics.
This is not the legacy that Amusi is fighting for. On the airy corner of Fortunes Walk, in London’s new E20 Olympic District, where Celebration Avenue meets Cheering Lane, the twin towers of Victory Plaza skyrocket. Their concrete facades form a private roof garden, safely raised from the street, while empty windows below promise the promise of a luxurious life in the East Village, the former athletes’ village now rebranded with Manhattan ambitions. Nearby, another pair of towers greets residents of the closed “green village” – where dogs, ball games or unattended children are not allowed. Both projects are built by a branch of the Qatari royal family and neither of them includes any affordable homes. Rents start at £ 1750 per month for a studio and go up to over £ 4000 per penthouse.
The development of East Village in the East London Olympic Park. Photo: Oliver Wainwright
“I feel like a huge betrayal,” said Amusi, who now works as a community organizer for Citizens UK, a charity that helps local families living in overcrowded housing and still shares an apartment in Newham with his mother and two others. little brothers. “It may seem that the area has changed for the better, but it is not for most existing residents,” he added. “They have introduced a new community and they are the ones who reap the benefits. There is no way for me or my friends to rent one of the new homes or afford to buy a shared home, despite the fact that we were campaigning for the Olympics to come here. Instead, heritage simply means gentrification on an industrial scale. “
In the eyes of many who have participated over the years, the result is a bitter failure. Nick Sharman was chief operating officer at the London Development Agency, whose job it was to buy land for the Olympic site and drive out local businesses. Most recently, in his role as labor adviser to Hackney, he spent six years on the planning committee of the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), the body tasked with fulfilling the promises made during the offer. He came to the conclusion that the initial aspirations were almost abandoned. “There are no longer any claims that the legacy is trying to achieve a positive result for East Enders,” he told me. “He is guided by a total market ideology, dressed in some good ambitious tales, with a few discarded trinkets to please the local people, while caring mainly for the rich. It’s a huge failure at every level. “
A former board member of the legacy corporation has similar concerns. “There are some pockets of brilliance,” he said, “but overall the project has not improved the chances of people living in the area. We created a new community and put it in the Olympic Park, creating a huge divide. “
Speaking to those who have sat on the boards of the various Olympic heritage bodies and the officials in charge of carrying out their commands, a number of key topics have emerged to explain all the missed opportunities and unfulfilled promises. At least part of the mess can be traced to the naivety and arrogance that characterized the initial planning of London’s first mayor, Ken Livingston. But most seem to agree that the moment the project seriously lost its way was in 2008 with the choice of Livingston successor Boris Johnson.
The origins of London’s Olympic candidacy had little to do with sports. After his election as London’s first mayor in 2000, Ken Livingston focused on the Games as a means of channeling money into East London’s regeneration. “He was absolutely ruthless about winning the Olympics,” Sharman said. “He gave it priority over everything else. But what gave weight to the offer was that he really believed it would help the area. “Livingston has always been candid about his motives:” I’m bidding for the Olympics because that’s the only way to make billions of pounds. the East End Government, “he said in 2008.
In 2004, Livingston described the Lower Leah Valley as an “area of opportunity.” The torn wedge that cuts through East London to the Thames has long been a dirty backyard, where sewage pumping, gas plants, high-voltage cables, car smashing and food processing companies gathered around a tangle of waterways, swamps and railways. . The toxic condition of the area was emphasized for the offer. It was a place poisoned by industry, an illegal dump in the center of the capital’s most needy neighborhoods. He was “ripe for reconstruction,” as the Olympic offer said.
In 2006, advising the Secretary of State on the mandatory purchase of £ 1 billion in land from local companies, Planning Inspector David Rose described it as a place of “environmental, economic and social degradation”. It had to be cleaned before the developers became interested, and the Olympics, with its huge budget for washing the soil, laying pipes, burying cables, and building roads, would be just a job. The promise of affordable housing was cited as a key justification for acquiring the land, with the 50% target set to “serve the needs of the local population and provide them with a lasting opportunity to live in the area”.
Works to demolish what will become the Olympic Park in 2007. Photo: Matt Cardy / Getty Images
But the research of an architectural academic paints a different picture than that of an abandoned wasteland. Prof. Juliet Davis, head of the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University, documented the place before the Games as part of her doctorate in the Olympic Games. When she mapped the area in 2006, Davis found more than 280 businesses, employing about 5,000 people, in crafts ranging from making belts to smoking salmon, supplying wigs to baking pretzels. She found a community living happily in low-cost cooperative housing – and a Pentecostal church in Ghana with one of the largest congregations in Europe.
“It wasn’t abandoning the rust,” she told me. “All of them were moved in the years after winning the offer, some far outside London and many of them were closed as a result. Many companies were already struggling, but instead of protecting them, the Olympic recovery exacerbated the decline. The so-called “affordable” workspace that is provided in and around the park is no longer available to the types of companies that were there before. ” A demographic survey in 2018 found that 80% of employees in the “employment hub” of the Olympic Park are white – compared to 31% in the local area.
Although the Olympics are often seen as the savior of this noxious swamp, bringing homes, jobs and shiny shopping malls to the East End, what is usually overlooked is that much of this development would have happened anyway.
In 2003, the largest application for planning since World War II was filed by Chelsefield, Stanhope and London and the Continental Railways for the eastern side of what became an Olympic site. Stratford City was to be the new Canary Wharf, a dazzling metropolitan center with 5,000 homes and 30,000 jobs, the group of tall towers connected to Europe through a new “international” station. (Eurostar has never stopped at Stratford International to this day.)
In July 2005, when London won the Olympic candidacy, the plans underwent a critical change. To save time …
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