Y11 Geography field trip - Olympic Park

Our Year 11 GCSE Geographers have had the opportunity to undertake a field investigation of Regeneration in Stratford, the Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park and surrounding areas. 

The groups made good time, travelling getting by coach to the Bus Station in Stratford High Street. Here we took an opportunistic chance to talk to local people and complete our questionnaire surveys to find out the attitudes of different groups and individuals towards the regeneration the Olympic Park, and whether they felt it had been a success. We also attempted to prove this by completing a transect through the area from Stratford New Town to the area of Hackney Wick, stopping at four different key sites, two of which were old and had more limited regeneration and two of which were areas that had been more completely transformed by the sport—and retail-led regeneration projects of the Olympics.

Using a range of new techniques, such as economic land use mapping and environmental quality surveys we aimed to create our own analysis and judgement as to whether regeneration had been successful, by seeing whether the new areas such as East Village were bringing about improvements for the community and offering a better quality of life. In the Olympic Park itself there were some surprises, such as the boarded-out construction area now known as Sweetwater and East Wick, to the west of the park, where a further 1500 new homes are in the process of being built. We might question whether these will be affordable new homes for locals or whether this will see further inward migration of skilled graduates from elsewhere in London and the UK, engulfing and sometimes displacing existing ‘Eastender’ residents. However, we also saw first hand the ‘art quarter’ of Hackney Wick, an area transitioning from the post-industrial manufacturing warehouses of the lower Lee Valley to a far more ‘hipster’ orientated location where a range of eateries, pubs and microbreweries offer a vibrant social life to residents of the nearby Olympic Park and surrounding area of east London.

This also ties in with our AQA GCSE Case Study for Urban Regeneration of Stratford and the Olympic Park, and the building of Sustainable Communities such as East Village, that are taught in class. The question remains – how successful has this regeneration been?   Dr Wood