Temporary you say?
Olympics will leave east London an open space to rival Hyde Park
Plans for a concert field, wetlands, meadows, and fitness trails in Lea valley
An artist's impression of the London 2012 Olympic stadium. Photograph: Press Association
After the athletes have gone and the flame has moved on, the biggest public park in more than a century will emerge from the site of the 2012 Olympics in London.
Its designers hope the 270-acre park (pdf), which will open in 2014, will capture the spirit of the great Victorian parks whose creators hoped to counteract the urban squalor of the industrial revolution.
The new park will have two rather more modern goals: to teach people to reduce their carbon footprint and to fight obesity. This week the organisers of the London games will unveil the initial plans for the park, which its designers claim will rival Hyde Park as the capital's greatest open space.
Acres of asphalt laid to withstand the 4 million visitors expected during the games will be torn up and replaced with meadows, wetlands and lawns, including a concert field with room for 50,000 spectators. George Hargreaves, the American landscape architect hired to design the park, said: "It will characterise east London and give the area an equal weight to the west. This will be east London's equivalent of Hyde Park."
A 120-metre wind turbine will loom above orchards and vegetable patches designed to encourage local food production, while a miniature biomass power station will run on willow cut from the park's wetlands. Steep scrambles and jumps will be incorporated into paths to help strollers fight the flab.
The Olympic park will cost the public purse £200m and will be built around the valley of the river Lea which runs from the Eurostar train station at Stratford to the Thames. At almost two and a half miles in length, the park will follow the form of the narrow river valley and will be fringed by intensive developments of offices and thousands of homes that are planned for the area after the games.
The athletes village will be transformed into almost 4,000 apartments which will overlook the new landscape. The park will be narrow and at one point just a couple of hundred metres across. This is partly down to the need to sell on much of the land which has been decontaminated especially for the games, to recoup costs for the event which have risen to £9.3bn.
Officials admit building a park is essential for increasing the value of neighbouring developments, a strategy that informed the development of Regent's Park by John Nash in the early 19th century. The Olympic Delivery Authority said the as yet unnamed Olympic park will be the largest new urban open space since the Victorian public park movement which produced grand spaces including Birkenhead Park by Joseph Paxton in 1847 and the Derby arboretum which opened as Britain's first public park in 1840. Until then, places like Hyde Park and Regent's Park had remained royal hunting grounds.
"They were built as part of the outcry about poor public health and squalor that flowed from the industrial revolution," said John Hopkins, head of parklands at the ODA. "The new agenda at the beginning of the 21st century is about achieving sustainability. Health remains a concern, particularly obesity."
Set among orchards, allotments, hazel coppice and nut groves, a "one planet pavilion" will demonstrate ways of living a low energy lifestyle. On the other side of the park, a miniature biomass power station will show how local energy generation can slash carbon emissions. The designers are planning to build a network of fitness trails, and outdoor gyms with equipment embedded in the landscape to encourage visitors to take more exercise. Steep 10m drops into the river valleys will be fitted with climbing walls and canoes will be for hire on the seven miles of waterways.
More conventional exercise activities will include a cricket pitch, novice and extreme mountain bike trails and horse-riding. A 10-acre grassland will be available for impromptu football kickabouts.
The plans seem a long way from fruition as scores of diggers clean up land contaminated with oil, diesel and low-level radioactivity from the area's postwar history as one of London's most intensive industrial areas. Specialist teams have swept the site for unexploded second world war bombs and are tackling an invasion of Japanese knotweed, a plant that grows so aggressively it can crack concrete.
"We plan to create another world with wetland habitats and broad expanses of meadows in the centre of east London," said Hargreaves. "This will be one of the great parks of London. I want it to become a park which gives a memory of London hosting the games.
"We are looking to achieve a grand scale and some epic spaces where you will sense the echo of 250,000 people moving through the park."
He intends to plant alders, dogwoods and willow to attract kingfishers and herons to the wetlands and traditional London trees, such as planes and limes, in the upland areas. The Olympic stadium will be scaled down to 25,000 seats and is likely to remain in use for sport, with Leyton Orient, the League One football club, the frontrunners to use it as a home ground. Just outside the park, the Olympic swimming pool will be available for public use.
Once the park is built, in 2014, its management will be taken on by the London Development Agency and the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority, which owns part of the land. A detailed plan is due to be submitted this year.