ABSTRACT
Commemorating the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II (b. 1926 – crowned 1952), the Olympic Park was the setting for the 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. Located on relatively flat, former industrial land towards the bottom end of the River Lea, an easterly tributary of the River Thames, it has been converted from backland to parkland; from a dumping ground with a part-canalized river to the waterside setting for new commercial and residential development in one of the poorest parts of Britain’s biggest city. Widely touted as ‘a new type of park for the twenty-first century’ (www.hargreaves.com) and the ‘largest new public park’ in Britain ‘for the past 150 years’ (Hitchmough and Dunnett 2013: 74), the parkland held the Olympic venues together and kept them apart. It helped to accommodate up to 250,000 visitors each day during the Games. It is the principal material legacy from the Games and, since its conception in 2003, it was ‘always the central ecological superstructure for the entire project’ (Prior and Hanway 2013: 49). And, in turn, it is now widely accepted that legacy – the lasting, long-term benefits – from staging an Olympic Games is ‘a key criterion for a winning city’ (ibid: 47).
