London 2012 blog

Last week, a mere eight days into my time as Sustainability Advisor at the Olympic Delivery Authority, I boarded a bus outside the shiny facade of Churchill Place, and headed for a tour of the infamous Olympic Park site.

Despite having been bombarded with numerous facts and figures pertaining to the Park, nothing else could have really given me a truer sense of its scale or enormity, than the 45-minute drive around the perimeters of the site, and ultimately through the entire Park itself.

If the sheer scale of the Park is massively impressive, then the plethora of different interconnected works being carried out by what is currently a 3,000-strong workforce is even more so. From demolition to soil cleaning, to pipe laying, to establishing the foundations of the Olympic Stadium; with four years to go until the 2012 Games come to London it’s great to see that such a huge amount of work has already been completed.

While I’m sure it may sometimes be frustrating for local residents having to cope with the adverse side effects of such a vast construction project, the benefits that they will undoubtedly reap in the future are staggering.

There’s no way that such large-scale investment and improvements (transport links, the planned green spaces and parkland, job development, world-class leisure facilities, the list goes on...) would be even conceivable without the impetus of something as prestigious and gigantic as the Games.

I’m really intrigued to see how the site develops over the coming months and years and am sure that it’ll be a fascinating transformation to observe, especially for the staff and local residents who’ll be lucky enough to see the incremental changes.