THE GREAT OLYMPICS BETRAYAL
With £9bn spent, we were promised London 2012 would leave a golden legacy for sport and the local community. Dream on
WHAT has become of the promises that have been the mantra of successive British politicians since Tony Blair was in power: that London 2012 would revive East London’s fortunes with a massive redevelopment on a scale not seen since the great days of Empire?
If we believe Lord Coe, the architect of the £9.3 billion Games, this pledge is already being delivered.
Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport when London’s bid succeeded in 2005, was similarly upbeat on BBC2’s Newsnight this week.
However, the facts belie their optimism.
For one thing, the number of Britons actually participating in sport is now 0.5 per cent lower than it was in 2012. The biggest decline is among ethnic minorities and the economically deprived — the very groups that were intended to benefit most from the legacy.
Of more pressing concern, however, is the hugely costly, yet painfully slow — and critics say lamentably ill-conceived — regeneration of the Olympic site. The plans promised 6,800 stylish new homes. But as yet, the new community is largely confined to blocks of flats in the former Athletes’ Village, where the soulless, impersonal ambience smacks of the old Eastern Bloc.
There is also a pristine, whitewalled medical centre (which is under-used because few patients are as yet registered there, while surgeries outside Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park are full to bursting) and a new academy school.
There are also shops, a gym, and a good many expensive restaurants and bars. As for the office premises and businesses which we were told would provide thousands of jobs, they largely remain on the drawingboard. Four years on from the Olympics, the park is a long way short of fulfilling the boast that it would become the envy of Europe.
It is also yet to live up to Lord Coe’s ambitious prediction that ‘the most enduring legacy of the Games will be the regeneration of an entire community for the direct benefit of everyone who lives there’.
He also said that ‘the Olympic Park will become a hub for East London, bringing together communities and acting as a catalyst for professional, social and economic change. It will become a model of social inclusion.’
The truth was spelled out this week by Sir Simon Jenkins, former chairman of the National Trust and a respected authority on architecture.
‘The Stratford site, ploddingly named Olympicopolis, has become the mausoleum to £9 billion of public money,’ he wrote in an article for the London Evening Standard.
Having visited the park recently, he found it ‘largely deserted,
dotted with the empty hulks of two weeks of “Olympic glory”’.
He went on: ‘Like all such places designed for temporary use, it is too big, too inflexible and too drenched in pomposity to start some new life. Not since the days of Nero was so much money wasted on “circuses”.’
He was particularly exercised by the way the Olympic Stadium has been handed to West Ham United in a controversial, 99-year tenancy, which has cost the club’s owners, sex industry tycoons David Gold and David Sullivan, just £15 million (leaving taxpayers with an eye-watering bill of £255million, covering every imaginable overhead, right down to the goal-nets and corner-flags).
Of the quarter-of-a-billion-pound sweetener, Jenkins writes: ‘For this sort of money every local library, museum and concert hall in London could be restored. The London Legacy Development Corporation [LLDC, which oversees the park] is drunk on public money.’
He even suggested West Ham might abandon the stadium before long.
When I visited the park this week, I expected work on the stadium to be complete. But just 24 hours before West Ham’s first match, the place was still surrounded by cranes, and the letters W, T and H were missing from the huge sign welcoming fans, so that it read, rather amusingly, ‘ES AM UNITED’.
Along with the garish claret and blue patterns emblazoned on the stadium’s superstructure, this hardly augurs well.
There may be worse to come. When the £6 million naming rights contract is allocated, the stadium could also be festooned with Tesco logos. Leaving the new football arena behind, the further I went from the park’s main entrance, the more desolate it became.
With a chill wind blowing across this vast expanse of land, the only sporting activities taking place on Wednesday afternoon were a local women’s hockey match (being played in an empty stadium), a couple of pit-a-pat tennis games and cyclists pedalling around inside the Velodrome.
So much for the legacy, I reflected, as dusk descended and the park became the vaguely menacing preserve of teenagers loitering in the children’s play areas.
The park’s defenders will tell you there are exciting developments taking place all the time. But Simon Jenkins last week looked at the newly unveiled plans for a £1.3billion cultural quarter, to be built where a fairground — with rides at £4 a go — now operates, and was less than complimentary. He dismissed it as ‘a row of three piles of boxes, a pastiche of 1960s Brutalism’ that would ‘house an art college, a ballet theatre (with a measly 600 seats) and an outpost of the V&A museum’, over which will loom towerblock apartments.
‘It is as far from today’s “smart city” of integrated urbanism as could be imagined,’ he went on. ‘As we can see again in Rio, the Olympic Games are a disaster for host cities.
‘They are estimated to have cost a million people their homes and jobs in the past half-century — for no “legacy” whatsoever.
‘The Stratford site ... lost 300 businesses and 14,000 jobs in its cluster of factories, warehouses and canal-side businesses. These informal activities never return, for the simple reason that the lofty vanities of Olympians prefer parks, stadiums and windy spaces. It used to be called fascist planning. It is now excused on the grounds that sport justifies all.’
From such a distinguished figure, this is a damning indictment. Leaving aside the park’s design, however, it is an appalling drain on public funds, as the LLDC’s 2014/15 annual accounts reveal. It had been envisaged that the Orbit tower, designed by Turner Prize-winning artist Sir Anish Kapoor, would attract 350,000 tourists and make a £1.2million profit in its first year. In fact, it was visited by just 123,000 people and lost £520,000.
Questioned in the London Assembly last February, LLDC chief executive David Goldstone, whose salary and perks are not far short of £200,000 (he is one of several corporation executives on six-figure packages), admitted the Orbit had amassed a debt of £10.6million and cost £2million a year to run.
It is forecast to have made another loss in the region of £500,000 when the 2015/16 accounts are published t his autumn.
MEANWHILE, the £269 million Olympic pool, where Brit Ellie Simmonds powered to gold in 2012, is proving no more profitable an attraction. Together with the Copper Box Arena, it lost £642,000, and a similar deficit is expected this year.
You can well imagine what might become of your local baths if the council was saddled with such massive losses.
Though an attendant told me it was sometimes busy, this week the Copper Box was eerily deserted. So, too, the vast media centre, now earmarked, so the signs inform us, as part of the ‘biggest, boldest and most ambitious technology innovation centre Europe has ever seen’.
The adjacent building, the broadcasting centre during London 2012, has, at least, acquired tenants. Loughborough University has opened a campus here, and it has become the headquarters of BT Sport, which rakes in huge profits by screening Premier and Champions League soccer matches. A dubious sporting legacy, you might think.
In the London Assembly, the vast sums disappearing into the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park — while elsewhere public projects are faced with swingeing cuts — are provoking anger among London politicians of both Left and Right.
Labour member Andrew Dismore is demanding the Orbit tower must be torn down to cut costs. Former Tory leader Andrew Boff dismisses
the premise that the Olympics would benefit ordinary East Londoners as ‘a con’.
‘London is crying out for more reasonably-priced houses, with gardens and front doors that open onto streets, not more expensive flats,’ he says. ‘But that’s what we’re getting here because we’ve handed over to the developers and said: “Do what you like.”’
According to Dr Penny Bernstock, of the University of East London, a leading expert on the legacy of London 2012, such anger is understandable. Developers now intend to set aside a maximum 31 per cent of homes as affordable housing, she says, and the final figure could drop even lower.
The International Olympic Committee would never have agreed to such a small percentage had it been written into the London bid.
Dr Bernstock told me even these so-called ‘affordable’ homes are prohibitively expensive for most people. ‘In East London, the average wage is £19,500, but one-bed homes in Chobham Manor [one of five swanky housing estates to be built on the Olympic site] are now selling for £470,000. To be able to afford that you would need an annual income of £70,000,’ she told me. ‘The whole thing is a scandal.’
As we might expect, the LLDC paints a very different picture.
‘We are delivering the most successful legacy programme in Olympic history,’ a spokesman insisted this week. ‘The scale of the task is enormous — creating a new city which will create more than £3 billion of economic benefit to one of the most deprived parts of the country.
‘Over the next 15 years we will build a new heart for East London.’ Perhaps, in time, they will. But at what vast price? And for whom? Was it intended that London’s great Olympic citadel should be colonised by wealthy incomers, who recline in exclusive apartments and dine on roast sea-bream at £32 a portion in the local restaurants, while life for those outside its rarefied confines remains as tough as ever? (For the money spent on the London Games, incidentally, you could build six large NHS hospitals or 60 secondary schools.)
Across the world in Rio, where the Olympics opened last night, hundreds of poor people vented their fury at the billions being squandered on a transient sporting festival that will do nothing to change their wretched existence, by rioting when the Olympic Torch was carried through their streets.
They hurled rocks at the procession and blocked its path. It took rubber-bullets and teargas to disperse them. Londoners tend to behave with more restraint. But having been misled into believing promises of a post-Olympics Utopia, perhaps the British should be protesting at the Olympic park with equal passion. AdditionAl reporting:
tim StewArt.