If it was a combination of Tony Blair’s charm, Ken Livingstone’s commitment and David Beckham’s celebrity that won the Olympics for London, it was the single-minded determination of an unlikely marriage of private and public sector partners that will have delivered the Games come the end of the month.
Estates Gazette brought back together some of those partners for a special podcast last month.
Recorded in Trident Studios in Soho, then-mayor of London Ken Livingstone wore the suit issued to the London bid team in Singapore in 2005. Sir Stuart Lipton, then chairman of Stanhope, came armed with a copy of the 2003 Stratford City Design Strategy drawn up by Chelsfield, London & Continental Railways and Stanhope. Former EG editor Peter Bill had spent the weekend going through old copies of the magazine, while Nigel Hugill – then managing director of Chelsfield and now chairman of the Royal Shakespeare Company – had withdrawn from commitments in that other Stratford to be there. To say the topic of conversation was still close to their hearts is something of an understatement.
Nigel, almost a decade ago the Stratford City Design Strategy set out an ambitious vision for developing the Stratford rail lines. As you look at the site today, is it as you expected it to be all those years ago?
Nigel Hugill: You couldn’t possibly have contemplated the pace of delivery and the massive boost that the Olympics provided. Certainly, from my point of view and I think from Stuart’s as well, it was the best site that we’d ever seen and it came about because they had to put the spoil from the Channel Tunnel rail link somewhere and they put it on the rail lands. That lifted the whole site about four metres. So it took something that was below the flood plain to above it. But at the same time, there were 420-kilovolt pylons all through the middle of the site.
However, as soon as the decision was made to award the Games to London, people rolled up their sleeves and said that we were open for business. And the biggest single statement about that was the day the contract was placed to bury the pylons. It wasn’t just the money, it was also the political will.
Who were the key players that enabled delivery of the site?
Sir Stuart Lipton: After Chelsfield and Stanhope had won the developer competition, we very quickly established a relationship with Sir Robin Wales, the leader of Newham, and then when Ken became mayor, with Ken, and with John Prescott. We needed, and got, a quarterly meeting, which everyone came to – TFL, the borough, you name it, they were involved, and they knew when Ken, ministers and others arrived they had to perform. So the unique point about Stratford was that everyone wanted it done.
In the 80s, the City wanted to become the financial centre of Europe and we got it done. Stratford was the same. Newham and the GLA wanted this to happen and it was done. If you want growth, we need that political support. Once we had the political support, there was a huge team to deliver this, with two terrific people – John Rhodes as planner and Patrick Robinson as legal planner. That team dreamed up how we could do it.
The scale of this scheme had never been achieved before. We started at 2m sq ft of retail and leisure with a bit of housing and we ended four years later with consent for 14m sq ft. That became the precursor to the Olympics. All the infrastructure ideas were there, apart from the overheads, the station upgrades were planned, the bus upgrades, the road upgrades were already there before the Olympics came along. As Ken has said, once you provide the infrastructure up front, the development follows, and that should be the way forward for future growth.
Was everyone on the same page?
Ken Livingstone: There was never any doubt in my mind that the developers and Newham council all wanted this to happen. The senior civil servants, I just think they felt this was a complete waste of time; this was Tony Blair’s and Ken Livingstone’s wet dream; it was never going to happen, we didn’t stand a chance. And that was quite good in a way because they just broadly rubber stamped all the preparation up until winning in Singapore, including the huge contract with the IOC that locked the government in – if they’d known we were going to win, they would have desperately tried to change it all.
At the first meeting of the committee after I came back from Singapore, the senior civil servant came up to me and proposed a committee of civil servants would run the whole project, and we’d all step back. I knew this was a disaster. He said to me: “It’s very important this finishes on time and on budget.” Loudly and unpleasantly, I just said: “Is there anything in your career that has ever finished on time and on budget?” There was deathly silence. We needed to bring in someone like David Higgins with a record of building things, and keep politicians away.
Nigel Hugill: The Treasury had had almost no involvement in the bid itself and they were absolutely flabbergasted when we won. And don’t think they had a plan for what was then to follow.
Peter, you immediately saw the opportunities for the property industry.
Peter Bill: As soon as the bid was announced, I realised this was a great story about rising land values. I don’t know what input on land values Chelsfield and Stanhope had, but immediately the Games were won, values there must have gone up tremendously. And then you had this rather complicated, or so it seemed to me, partnership among people of unlike minds and there was bound to be a falling-out.
That said, I think it ended up fine. Westfield came in, a little uncertainly at the beginning; people didn’t understand Westfield and thought they were a very arrogant Australian outfit, but they do what they say they are going to do, which is quite rare. They actually built the shopping centre, and built it a year early.
The future? I worry about the legacy body and what it has got to do now. Some good ideas have been put down. Margaret Ford’s idea of lots of family housing was a good one. But the media centre was a white elephant. It should have been a tent.
