The only way is up

Howard Byrom

Will the regeneration of London’s East End for the coming of the Olympic Games pay off?

When one door shuts, another opens – according to the old adage; and between 1960 and 1980, London’s docks shut one by one. The wharfs and warehouses that had fuelled an empire for 300 years lay empty and forlorn across eight square miles of derelict land.

But all remnants of end-of-empire pessimism and economic neglect have since been wiped from the slate. In its place is a crystalline satellite city populated by an international workforce housed in towering monuments to world commerce.

HSBC, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, and The Bank of America led the financial sector, while media organisations such as Reuters, and a rash of UK national newspapers, deserted their traditional stamping ground of Fleet Street for the Docklands.

The city’s successful bid to host the Olympics in 2012 offers a golden opportunity to promote technology for further urban renewal of its last wilderness – east London. Visually unappealing and devoid of dynamism, the boom-time cruelly sidestepped Stratford, Canning Town, and The Lower Lea Valley.

Well, the doors of opportunity will soon be swinging open. An estimated £100bn of development is expected to transform London over the next two decades – it represents the biggest period of change since Victorian times.

“We want to regenerate enormous areas of London and improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people,” urges Lord Coe, chairman of London’s 2012 organising committee.

Hosting the world’s biggest sporting event in 2012 for the first time since 1948 will be an epic task for the British capital – and one that’s guaranteed to be colossally expensive. Building programmes of this kind around London have a habit of soaring hilariously over budget. Just look at the recent track record:

The ill-fated Millennium Dome opposite the gleaming Docklands development was nearly £400m over budget; London Underground’s Jubilee Line extension was £1.4bn over budget; and the Channel Tunnel managed to escalate costs by nearly £5bn over the original estimate.

But all these developments except the doomed Dome (which will be given a chance to redeem itself for the Games) have been turned around to become enormous successes. And despite negativity in the press, experts agree that the economic benefits could far outweigh the costs. An economic report by Experian puts the value of the Olympic Games to Britain’s construction industry at a massive £9bn.

“This will pay dividends for all of us,” Prime Minister Tony Blair explains. “To have the Olympic Games in 2012 is going to be a huge thing for the country – and for London it will be tremendous because it will regenerate the whole of that part of the East End of London.”

London's mayor Ken Livingston and the government have agreed a public funding package of up to £2.375bn to cover everything from new facilities to Olympic transport. The London Development Agency bolsters the argument with the promise that 70,000 jobs will be created in construction sector alone during the next 15 years.

Of course, it’s a huge task to get everything ready in time for the opening ceremony.

Looking around the proposed site – which extends northwards and east from Canary Wharf to the Lea Valley, Hackney Marshes, and Stratford – it’s worlds apart from London’s thrusting Docklands.

One of the main problems is transport – but not for long, according to Mr Livingston: “In 2012, the area will be easily accessed by the new Stratford Channel Tunnel rail link and the planned Crossrail service will have the capacity to transport 150,000 people across the city during the weekday morning peak time.

“Transport for London have delivered the Docklands Light Railway extension to City Airport and begun tunnelling under the river to Woolwich linking up venues for the 2012 Games. They have successfully added a seventh carriage to all Jubilee Line [Underground] trains greatly increasing capacity – not just in every morning rush hour, but on what will also be a key link to the Olympic Stadium.”

London, says Mr Livingston, is expected to have gained 700,000 new residents by 2012, equivalent to the entire population of Leeds. “Once the Games are over, the facilities and new housing will quickly be absorbed in a city that Premiership football sides have already expressed interest in the main stadium.”

Of course, it won’t just be the deprived East End that will feel the benefits of redevelopment for the Olympics. Many events like rowing at Eton will take place nearly 40 miles upstream on the River Thames, on the western outskirts of Europe’s largest city. The Olympics are a great reason to tighten up the city’s sometimes shaky transport infrastructure. In fact, some projects are already well under way.

With five airports, six railway terminals and full road and sea access, London is already an international travel hub. Every year the city welcomes more than 11 million international visitors, many flying in via Heathrow Airport. The world’s busiest international airport, it handled more than 63 million passengers in 2002. And it is getting bigger and busier all the time: a fifth terminal opening in 2008 is due to handle another 30 million passengers a year.

With predictions of a 10 percent increase in London’s population over the next decade, a new wave of growth is expected again. And it’s the Thames estuary – or Thames Gateway – which will absorb the next wave of Londoners.

In early 2006, the number of people officially employed around the Docklands estate was 78,000, and increasing retail space means that around 500,000 people shop at Canary Wharf weekly. Besides the redevelopment of the 500-acre site in Stratford, much of the commercial expansion will see massive growth around Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs.

Plans are already underway for Canary Wharf to more than double in size. The number of people working in Canary Wharf is set to rise to 90,000 by 2008, and to 200,000 by 2014.

Traditionally, London has focused on the western sector of the city, where much of the city’s personal wealth is concentrated. However, the coming years will see the first time that the East End will be the focus of the world’s attention.

In fact, the latest figures on annual earnings, published by the Office for National Statistics, already make for optimistic reading. Workers in Canary Wharf are now the highest paid in the UK, and have overtaken the City for the first time. Annual salaries for full-time workers in Canary Wharf went up by 19.5 percent, taking them to an average of £66,300. That’s nearly three times the national average.

For the East End of London, it seems the only way is up.