This summer marks the fourth anniversary of the London Olympic Games. In June and July there are a number of tours in the former Olympic Park.
New London Walking Tour – Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
By: London Festival of Architecture 2016 in partnership with Coin Street Community BuildersTo celebrate the London Festival of Architecture, NLA has commissioned a special series of New London Walking Tours, happening every Saturday for the month of June. Our walks will explore interventions being implemented across the capital to enhance, enrich and encourage interaction, engagement and community growth in areas of huge development. As well as tracking the wider development of these areas, our walks will visit a number of carefully designed schemes where outdoor public space is given extra attention to create attractive and comfortable places for communities to grow.
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park – Saturday 18 June – 14:00
Four years after that momentous summer, our Olympic Park walk will focus on the sustainable legacy of the park’s buildings, public space and transport links. During our walk we will explore numerous pedestrian-priority interventions and public spaces which help build connections between the existing and new communities of this increasingly changing area. Starting with the Olympic Stadium by HOK and its neighbouring Aquatics Centre by Zaha Hadid Architects, we discover the site of Olympicopolis – a multicultural and academic cultural centre in the east.Tracing the meanders of the River Lea tributaries that criss-cross the park, we see Hackney’s thriving Copper Box by Make Architects and Populous and the transformed 2012 press and media hubs now Here East by Hawkins/Brown Architects. Hopkins Architects’ RIBA award-wining Velodrome presides over a two-wheeler zone, while over-the-bridge the bright blue Lee Valley Hockey and Tennis centres by Stanton Williams Architects define the QEOP’s north boundary. Finally, our walk will discover the multi-architect designed Athletes Village complex which now thrives as East Village – also home to vital local community amenities like Chobham Academy by AHMM and the Sir Ludwig Guttmann Health Centre by Penoyre & Prasad Architects.
This walk starts at Stratford Station, Westfield exit ticket machines.
Walking Tour – Olympics and Beyond
The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and its Stratford environs is one of the busiest and most unusual development areas in London. The Olympic Park, its venues and village are all now open in their post Olympic form, alongside Europe’s largest urban retail centre and the office sector, known as the International Quarter is now under construction.
This is an opportunity to explore this rapidly changing area, in the context both of its rich industrial past, and ambitious plans for the future, which include ‘Olympicopolis’, containing new facilities for the V&A, Sadler’s Wells, London College of Fashion and University College London.
The tour takes in all the Olympic venues, the Orbit, the north and south Park, and through what is now known as East Village, with a brief incursion into the dramatically different world beyond the Park at Hackney Wick.
Your guide is Ralph Ward, who has worked on the planning and development of the area for over twenty years, most recently as Olympic planning and regeneration advisor for the Department for Communities and Local Government. He is now visiting professor at the University of East London.
Meeting point: Outside the main entrance of Stratford Station, exact details provided on booking. Cost £25.50. Tour duration 2-2.5hours approx
Saturday 11 June 11am
Saturday 16 July 2.30pm