My Kind of Town: Tom Lacey
Tom Lacey explains how London’s Olympic Park has evolved into a thriving neighbourhood, but kept the wild, unpolished spaces that are a respite from city life.
My family and I have lived in Chobham Manor, one of the Olympic Legacy developments, for five years now. An architect buying a new-build developer home raised some eyebrows at the time, but two of my immediate neighbours are also architects, which has been somewhat reassuring!
We moved from the ‘other side of the tracks’ in Stratford, which is a particularly stark divide. Some of the criticisms that the Olympic legacy hasn’t delivered for east Londoners are fair and borne out in this arguably ever-increasing divide. However, as a new public amenity, the park is an unbridled success. Rowan Moore’s recent review of UCL East by Stanton Williams said, ‘The Olympic Park, it cannot be said too often, is largely a joy and a triumph.’ As he notes, some of the surrounding buildings and their cohesion and synergy with the park are a work in progress, but
in amongst the high degree of planning there is joy in some of the less formal, unplanned moments.
It was the park itself that triggered our move to the ‘new’ Stratford. We found ourselves spending more and more time in and around the park and wanted to be part of it rather than just regular visitors. I had always imagined we would buy an east London terraced house and do a ‘Dezeen ready’ kitchen extension, but we could never reconcile this with the access to green space and amenities that the park offered. We found a developer box that was surprisingly generous with a clever layout and have spent plenty of time and resource making it a home.
On those early visits, the sheer number of prams in East Village (the legacy conversion of the Athletes’ village to a new community of largely private rental homes) always suggested that something that had massive appeal to young families was emerging, albeit slowly. This was largely down to the amount of pedestrian space, maturing landscape, increasing array of independent shops and cafes that had a genuine community feel and, of course, the proximity to the park. It still took a huge leap of faith and a good deal of imagination though as, on the wrong day, you could lurch from one wind tunnel to the next and find your path blocked by a new hoarding going up around the next development plot. Many hours were spent on the LLDC planning portal getting comfortable with and envisaging future phases that have since become our surroundings.
Because of the constant roll out of ‘phases’ and ‘zones’, change around the park could all feel a bit in-organic and it was only when we had our first child in January last year that it fully clicked for us. Very early morning walks with our own pram suddenly had us exploring every inch of the park and there are genuine moments when you can forget you are in Zone 2. These are often spaces that have been allowed to go a bit wild and go unpolished: Waterglades, the nature walk through the balancing ponds created as part of the park SuDS strategy; the rickety fishing platforms amongst the reeds on the River Lea. My favourite early morning walk moment was on a misty spring morning when a jazz saxophonist was practicing off in the distance – it was an eerie, surreal and beautiful moment.
We have seen a lot of change in five years living with the park and its surroundings, and while some of that change is in its new buildings, the biggest changes have been in the way the public realm has been adopted by residents and how it has benefitted from being ‘lived-in’. What were sometimes windswept spaces now host community markets, exercise classes or even outdoor church sermons. What has been so great to see is this highly planned part of London take on a community that uses it in ways that were envisioned, and some that were not.
Tom Lacey is a director at Barr Gazetas
Isolde Brampton-Greene2025-04-10T17:34:02+01:00
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Source: Architecture Today