Above A presentation of the Paris 2024 logo on the Arc de Triomphe
Top left and left Dominique Perrault Architecture designed the site of the Olympic and Paralympic Village for the city
great expense to the public, and gifted to a Premier League team – after it was originally promised to be a permanent home for athletics, but was inevitably found to be commercially unsustainable. A wonderful velodrome continues to host intermittent championships, and the park itself is the largest urban park created in western Europe for more than 150 years, designed to enrich and preserve the local environment by restoring wetland habitats and planting native species of plants. Tere are also some fine new buildings: for UCL, called East Marshgate; a factory for fashion, the London College of Fashion (LFF), previously dispersed across six sites and now under one roof for the first time in its history; and the intriguing V&A East will open its storehouse and museum in 2025; Sadler’s Wells ballet will one day open a new theatre. So things are finally happening.
Early hopes and estimates of how many homes and jobs would be created on the park
In France, there were no new sporting facilities. Everything required for an Olympic Games was already there
and what the broader benefits for east London might be were always likely to be revised, adapted, contested and in danger of being overly optimistic. With housing, always a hot topic, five residential areas have been developed on land within the park itself, owned by the public body responsible for the district and its environs. Te term ‘affordable’ is kicked around a lot and is both slippery and an enduring source of cynicism about just how ‘affordable’ homes actually are, and for whom. Accusations of betrayal abound. In his ‘betrayal’ article for the Guardian, Oliver Wainwright reported that to qualify for shared ownership homes in ‘the Olympic area’ demanded ‘an annual income of at least £60,000’, contrasting with an ‘average income in local boroughs’ of ‘about £27,000’ – a figure disputed by the ONS that said it was £35,235. Iain Sinclair, who was a media go-to man for anti-Games scorn and mockery in advance of London 2012, wrote in the FT about the absence of kitchen facilities within each unit
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