Politics
What was the legacy of the London 2012 Olympic Games?
Paris is basking in a wave of joy over the Olympics. With the Games in town, the authorities have pumped significant funds into the capital for all non-French speakers. The most visible has been the cleaning up of the Seine, so that, unlike the Thames, it is now safe to swim in. (Well, the triathlon has had to be slightly delayed.)
But that’s not all that’s new in Paris. €35 billion has also been spent on the Grand Paris Express, which will link 200 kilometres of new metro lines between the suburbs. They’ve also modernised the Grand Palais on the Champs-Élysées, built a new arena and aquatic centre, and created an Olympic village in the northern Saint-Denis district, 30 per cent of which will join the region’s social housing stock once all the medals have been awarded.
For some Britons, all this renovation will resonate only faintly in their memories. When London hosted the Olympics in 2012, we were also told that our city would change for the better after the Games. We were promised new sporting venues and new places of interest for tourists. But did the Olympics really leave a lasting mark? Here we explore the legacy of the British Games and ask: what did London 2012 give us?
West Ham United via Getty Images
First, hosting the Olympics obviously requires venues where elite athletes can perform, and many venues were built for London 2012. Among them was the new 80,000m stadium near Stratford, the centrepiece of the Olympic Park, which hosted the athletics events of Mo Farah, Jess Ennis and Usain Bolt at his peak that year. After much debate, the venue is now called the London Stadium and is home to West Ham Football Club.
In addition to the Olympic Stadium, several other sports facilities have been built in the East London park. There is the Lee Valley VeloPark, with its outdoor velodrome and BMX track; the Copper Box Arena, which was used for handball and now hosts many sports; and the Aquatics Centre, still used by swimmers. Other basketball and water polo arenas were temporary and removed after the Games, while a hockey arena was moved to become the Lee Valley Hockey and Tennis Centre nearby. Much of the surrounding area is also a large park, with a focus on restoring wetland habitats. Not every sport required a new venue: events such as tennis were played at Wimbledon.
Daniel Lynch
Just as in Paris, there were many promises made before London 2012 about how the Olympics would help our capital by creating huge numbers of new homes. There was particularly strong enthusiasm in Newham, which was told it would be regenerated, to the direct benefit of all residents. The idea was to produce up to 40,000 new homes, many of them affordable.
But the reality has been far less impressive. In the end, according to the Guardian, only 13,000 homes have been built on and around the Olympic site by 2022. Of these, only 11% are truly affordable for people on average local incomes. Even fewer have been built on the Olympic park itself: fewer than 200 new homes have been offered at the lowest rents, despite more than 4,500 being promised. The Victory Plaza towers, which stand on the site of the former athletes’ village, are a good example of the type of housing that has been built. They contain no affordable housing and rents start at around €2,000 a month. Although it was announced that the athletes’ village would be publicly owned, it was sold in 2011 for around half of what it cost to build, representing a loss of €275m to the taxpayer.
Although few housing promises were kept, local community group London Citizens did win some small victories, securing a deal that at least half of the people working at the Olympic site would be local, that they would be paid the London Living Wage and that a skills academy would be set up to train local people.
Justine Simons, London's Deputy Mayor for Culture, on the east bank of the Olympic Park in Stratford.
Matt Writtle
During the Olympics, a huge media centre was built next to the sporting events, a temporary home for 20,000 broadcasters, photographers and print journalists from around the world. The building, now known as Here East, is currently used by businesses, charities and universities. University College London opened its new UCL East campus in the park in 2023, while the University of the Arts London’s London College of Fashion also opened its new site there last year. In the business world, Transport for London’s headquarters are now also nearby.
More recently, there are hopes that the expanded area will become a technology and arts hub called the East Bank. It is expected to host offshoots of renowned organisations such as the BBC, which plans to relocate from studios formerly located in Maida Vale, a new ballet theatre for the Sadlers Wells dance company, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, which plans to open V&A East in 2025. The new V&A space is committed to focusing on how artists and designers work to transform our world for the better, operating as a creative campus and social space for diverse groups.
A plan for an Olympic museum was briefly mooted, but was abandoned in 2013. Elsewhere, part of the Olympic Park has been converted into concert venues. One of the hottest tickets in London over the past two years has been the ABBA Holographic Tour, which is taking place in a purpose-built arena in the Olympic Park. On top of that, the London Stadium isn’t just home to West Ham. It’s also set to host other concerts, including Burna Boy and the Foo Fighters in the summer of 2024.
No longer sponsored: The cable car of the new City Hall
Ross Lydall
As Paris learned when an arson attack threatened its rail network, transport infrastructure is vital to the success of the Olympics. Anticipating this, Transport for London aimed to improve the British capital's public transport system before 2012. This included extending the London Overground's East London line from Surrey Quays to Clapham Junction, via Peckham. TfL also increased the capacity of the Docklands Light Railway, or DLR, and invested in the North London line, and built high-speed 'Javelin' lines between Kings Cross and Stratford.
The least useful piece of transport infrastructure created for the Olympics was the London cable car, which spans the Thames between the Greenwich Peninsula and the Royal Docks, and cost around $60 million to build. The then mayor, Boris Johnson, boasted that it could carry 2,500 passengers an hour, but it is not used much today: at one point it was used by only four regular passengers, Freedom of Information requests have shown. The line lost its lucrative sponsorship deal with Emirates, and now has a cheaper contract with the Swedish multinational IFS.
ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower
AFP/Getty Images
According to an apocryphal story, Boris Johnson bumped into Britain’s richest man, Lakshmi Mittal, in a changing room at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009. The then mayor is said to have persuaded Mittal to help fund a monument for the 2012 London Olympics. That tower became Orbit, designed by sculptor Anish Kapoor, Britain’s tallest sculpture. Johnson was enthusiastic about the tower, which was eventually opened to the public. “It would have wowed the Romans,” the mayor said. “It would have eclipsed the aspirations of Gustave Eiffel, and it will certainly be worthy of the greatest show on Earth, in the greatest city in the world.”
Unfortunately, ArcelorMittal’s Orbit Tower has not become a major tourist attraction. While its slide is impressive, the tower is currently closed for repairs and is reportedly set to reopen in early 2025. By 2019, visitor numbers had already fallen to 155,000 per year, and it’s likely to have declined since then. At the time, the tower was already $13 million in debt, with interest on Mittal’s loan mounting (he didn’t actually donate the money). The reviews aren’t good: Orbit Tower was recently described by the New York Times as perhaps the worst public sculpture of the 21st century.
Mo Farah wins his second 5000m gold medal in London 2012
The legacy of the London 2012 Olympics was not just meant to stay in the capital. Officials promised to fund sporting activities across the country, improve participation across the UK and improve the health of Britons. However, their efforts have not been entirely successful. A 2023 report from the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee said that while it was hoped that the €8.8 billion spent on the event in total would leave a lasting legacy, not all of the benefits have been realised.
Despite the increased funding, the proportion of adults playing sport at least once a week fell in the first three years after the Games. This led to a re-direction of funding. But this hasn’t worked either, and the report says that of the €1.5bn in grants Sport England has given out since 2016, the body only knows where €450m has been spent. And despite spending €323m a year since 2015, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Sport England have made little progress in tackling inequality and barriers to sport participation, even in the London areas where the Games were held. Will Paris be any luckier?
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