• Greenwich

• Hackney

• Newham

• Tower Hamlets

• Waltham Forest

Projected benefits for the 5 Olympic boroughs

East London Benefits

The Olympic Games will bring extensive benefits to East London, including:

• Attracting massive inward investment

• Delivering significant legacy benefits from the infrastructure required, including new flagship

sports facilities.

• Boosting London's tourism industry.

• Opening up opportunities for local communities in the Valley, among the most deprived in

the UK.

• Delivering 9,000 new homes in the Olympic precinct after the 2012 Games

• Providing a major boost for business and jobs

• Engaging and motivating young people in sport and physical activity – in an area which has

one of the worst health records in the UK.

• Showcasing the strengths of east London – e.g. as a thriving creative and cultural quarter of

the capital.

• Providing focus for new local training and skills programmes specifically linked to the needs

of the 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games – e.g. construction

• Vastly improving the physical landscape of the Lower Lea Valley – pylons that characterise

the area will be removed.

• Creating a huge new parkland that will stretch from Hackney Marshes in the north of the

Valley, south along the River Lea to the Thames

• Bringing state of the art 'green' energy facilities to power the Games, securing a permanent

energy legacy for the Valley, in line with the Mayor's Sustainable Development Commission's

recommendations

• Restoration of the River Lea's unique waterways, improving the ecology and enhancing the

biodiversity of the area.

• Providing a better sense of security and openness along the canals.

• Building on the public and private investment already underway in the Lower Lea Valley

area, including the international passenger station on the channel tunnel rail link at Stratford

and the associated commercial housing, retail and leisure developments.

• Levering greater private investment and providing the impetus for lasting regeneration on a

scale that years of separate initiatives have failed to achieve. With this level of investment,

regeneration will happen sooner and be of a higher quality than would otherwise be

possible.

• Providing an opportunity to improve the health of residents in the area.

Olympics-led Regeneration: The Five East London Olympic host

boroughs

The centre of Olympics-led regeneration is the five East London Olympic host boroughs of Newham,

Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Waltham Forest and Greenwich. They have rising populations, a high

percentage of young people compared to the rest of England and relatively high levels of social

deprivation. Since the nineteenth century East London has provided the location for manufacturing

industries and the city’s docklands. It housed the city’s working classes and remained, throughout

the twentieth century, relatively poor compared to the rich west of London. When the docks closed

in the 1970s, the area suffered major job losses in traditional manufacturing and processing

industries from which many parts have not recovered. By the beginning of the twenty first century,

the extensive regeneration of London’s Docklands and improvements in infrastructure had created

an area that is socially polarized, containing pockets of relative affluence within an area that has a

high concentration of relative poverty and deprivation.

The hosting of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012 is aimed at catalyzing a process of

extensive social and economic renewal that addresses these underlying social and economic issues.

In linking the games to the social transformation of East London, the government and the key

stakeholders in ‘London 2012’, have embarked upon a new and highly ambitious interpretation of

the games’ contribution to the social legacy to be achieved by hosting the world’s most prestigious

sporting event.

Defining Olympic Legacy

“Legacy” has come to prominence in Olympic discourse in recent years because of the capacity the

term offers in managing tensions between Olympic dreams (or promises) and municipal-financial

realities.

Olympic “legacy” offers bridges between two potentially divergent narratives setting the practical

accountancy (and financial and political accountability) of city planning, against the ‘creative’

accounting that underpins Olympic dreams and promises. Legacy has assumed a complex range of

meanings in the discourse of the sports mega event and the evaluation of its implications for urban

regeneration and economic development. It is not to be confused with the ‘narrower’ evaluation of

socio-economic impact whose focus is primarily upon the costs and benefits of the sports event

itself. Its focus combines the direct Games-related evaluation of income/costs with a broader

evaluation of the additional or indirect contribution to infrastructural, environmental, cultural,

economic and social development. In this sense ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ legacies

accrue over time. Indeed, the time span for evaluation should reflect the complexity of this process.

The ‘London 2012’ Policy Framework

The policy is driven by five government promises:

Making the UK a world-leading sporting nation.

Transforming the heart of east London.

Inspiring a new generation of young people to take part in volunteering, cultural and physical

Activity.

Making the Olympic Park a blueprint for sustainable living.

Demonstrating the UK is a creative, inclusive and welcoming place to live in, visit and for

Business.