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As soon as the Paralympic Games came to a close
work began to create the Queen Elizabeth Olympic
Park. Sporting arenas were built for the Games but
everything else from shops to restaurants were
Kleenex & spit temporary constructions many in the
marquee style giving the park during Games time the
rather pleasant feeling of a very British county show
set in rather nice gardens. The basketball arena, water
polo arena and the grandstand seating for the aquatics
centre will be taken down. Some of the bridges built
across the Bow Back Waters that crisscross the park
will be removed and the massive asphalt walkway
running the whole length of the park, opening into a
vast plaza at the southern end by the Stadium to allow
huge numbers of people to move about quickly will
be dug up. The challenge is to create interesting areas
to replace all that asphalt. 2000 trees will be planted
and a visitor centre and some permanent cafés will be
built. It’s a big job and the first part of the new park
isn’t scheduled to open until 27 July 2013, exactly
one year after the Olympic Opening Ceremony.
A lot of thought was put into landscaping the park
ready for the Games, indeed LOCOG employed two
university professors and a Chelsea Flower Show
gold medal winner to create something special and
by Jove didn’t they do well. The scale of the
landscaping prepared for the Olympic and Paralympic
Games is staggering: over 600 acres
of
woodlands
and wetlands, wildflower meadows and global
gardens were laid out. The UK's largest ever
man-made wildflower meadows were sown back in
May designed to buck nature and burst into golden
flower around the Olympic Stadium in August.
The 2012 Gardens follow the Waterworks river for
half a mile through the park and pay tribute to
Britain's long history of exploration, trade and plant
collecting
with 60,000 plants and 60,000 bulbs from
250 different species , divided into four temperate
regions: Europe, Americas, Asia and the southern
hemisphere. Up by the Velodrome 300,000 plants in
the landscaped wetlands look like they’ve always
been there—they haven’t, they had to move a fridge
mountain when they started work on the park - quite
literally a mountain of fridges! The team also created
a rather gorgeous dell containing a modern spin on
the bandstand and throughout the park the benches,
which are very generous in number, have their own
quirky memorial plaques. But running down the
middle of the Olympic Park is all that boring asphalt
and it’s got to go! Landscape architect James Corner,
a Brit educated in Manchester but now based in New
York has been given the job of creating something
special to replace the asphalt.
James Corner’s company Field Operations has built
a reputation for making the most of both the local
ecology of a site and its location, however unlikely,
with projects that include the High Line Park created
on the mile and a half long-abandoned viaduct of the
elevated train that once ran level with the roof tops
through New York’s Meatpacking district to Hell’s
Kitchen. He also designed Freshkills Park, the
massive and horribly named land fill site on Staten
Island, three times the size of Central Park, where
the remains from the Twin Towers were taken.