The troubled Olympic media centre should be used to create a cultural legacy from the Games, say some of the key players who delivered the Stratford site.
Nigel Hugill, Sir Stuart Lipton and former London mayor Ken Livingstone told a special Estates Gazette podcast that it was culture, not sport, that would have a greater, lasting impact.
“We should be scouring the world to try to find a Guggenheim or somebody,” said Hugill. “The amount of money that is being provided from the bids is so low that we have got to look at other solutions.”
He added: “The IOC is preoccupied with legacy, but if you look at sporting facilities of themselves, they don’t particularly create the legacy that they hanker after. You can see them disused in a whole series of previous Olympic cities. It is the cultural, it is the educational [that lasts] and I think it is incumbent upon us to start looking at more imaginative uses.”
Livingstone said that during his time in office he had sought to persuade the Indian film industry to take the space. “Bollywood is going to grow, it will be the main film industry in the world – it most probably is already. It’s just that most of them don’t end up on our screens, but they need a capacity in Europe and [the media centre] would have been ideal.”
Click below to listen to the special Olympic Reunion podcast, or download it here. Alternatively, subscribe to Estates Gazette’s iTunes channel.
Damian.wild@estatesgazette.com
