As London’s City Hall weighs up whether to go head to head with Paris and bid for the 2025 World Expo, Tessa Jowell told HOST CITY that the benefit to the nation as a whole should be a key consideration of a bid.

The former Olympics minister Jowell was a major driving force behind London’s successful Games bid and is a popular contender to become the next mayor of London.

Asked whether she thought London should bid for the World Expo in 2025, Jowell told HOST CITY “It’s not a simple yes or no, but yes, we should certainly undertake the feasibility and be very clear about what the benefits are for London and the UK, beyond the duration of the Expo as an event in its own right.

“You look at every aspect of the development and you say ‘how can we spread the benefit; how can we make sure that businesses outside London know about the possibility of tendering for the contracts?’ 

London 2012 could set the template here, Jowell indicated. “We avoided displacement from the regions to London’s benefit by ensuring that nearly 50 per cent of the contracts were let to businesses around the country, and the whole country derived benefit.

“Before bidding for the Expo, London needs to ask ‘What’s the possibility of diffusing, dispersing events outside the host city?’

“The Olympics is very strict about that; you have to have a host city, but we were able to have training camps around the country, which gave a bit of Olympic excitement and Olympic magic right across the UK.

“It was a Games that was so true to the city that London is – the greatest city in the world, open, diverse, tolerant – that’s what the Games captured so beautifully, and I think that’s why not just Londoners but people from all around the UK took the Games to their hearts.”

Jowell played a crucial role in evaluating the feasibility of London’s Olympic bid and driving the bid forward. 

“My role was to turn my personal belief that this would be great for the country into a proposition that had credibility and could be sold to the whole cabinet, every department of government, all the key supporting organisation and then the chancellor of the exchequer and the prime minister,” she told HOST CITY.

“I set a number of tests against which the proposition could be judged. Was it affordable? Could we deliver it? Would there be a legacy? And could we win the bid against Paris, who was the other key contender at the time?”

President Francois Hollande announced Paris’s candidacy for the 2025 World Expo on 4th November, saying “France is capable of great events, major projects,” with French Prime minister Manuel Valls in October describing the World Expo as a “magnificent opportunity for the image of Paris and of France in the world.”

Mayoral race to follow general election

Dame Tessa Jowell confirmed to HOST CITY that she is seriously considering standing for the nomination as Labour’s candidate to be mayor of London after stepping down as MP at general election on 7 May. 

“Now is not the moment for a formal declaration because we have a general election to fight and I hope to win, and that’s what I am focussed on,” she told HOST CITY.

“I think you’ve got to take these things in their natural sequence. The general election is the biggest challenge facing us at the moment.”

A recent YouGov poll showed that Tessa Jowell would not only be the most popular candidate among Labour supporters, but also enjoy the strongest cross-party support.

The redevelopment of the south section of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is now complete, enabling the park to fully open to the public for the first time since the London 2012 Olympic Games. 

“In the 18 months since the end of the Games, we have created a magnificent new park for London with beautiful parklands and waterways and world-class sporting facilities,” said Dennis Hone, Chief Executive of the London Legacy Development Corporation, which led the post-Games transformation of the park.

“We want people to come and enjoy this new destination, whether they are reliving the memories of the golden summer of 2012 or experiencing it for the first time.”

At 560 acres, or 2.2sq km, the park is the largest to open in London for more than 100 years. Newly landscaped parklands, waterways and an action-packed adventure playground featuring swings, a rope bridge and activity zones have transformed the site.

Sir John Armitt, chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority said: “The Olympic Park was a huge hit with spectators in 2012, but now countless thousands more will get a chance to see how it has been transformed for generations to come to use and enjoy – walking, relaxing, seeing the sights, or having a picnic, as well as playing and watching sport in four world-class venues.

“This, and the work we are doing to complete 2,818 new homes in East Village, is proof that the legacy we all talked so much about is very real.”

The park also features a new tree-lined promenade with a unique globe lighting system, interactive water fountains, four themed walking trails and miniature gardens that represent different climatic regions including South Africa, the Americas and the Mediterranean.

The northern section of the park, which began to reopen in July 2013 with concerts and other major events, has already attracted more than a million visitors. The Copper Box Arena, the first former Olympic venue to open to the public, has already had more than 100,000 visitors. The Aquatics Centre, which reopened on 1 March 2014, has already received over 55,000 visitors.

The Lee Valley VeloPark opened its doors for public use for the first time on 31 March 2014, while the Lee Valley Hockey and Tennis Centre will open in June 2014. 

Meanwhile, the Olympic Stadium is being transformed into a multi-use venue. A major new arts and cultural centre is also set to be built within the park.

Planning permission has also been granted for up to 10,000 new homes, including more than 2,800 in the former Olympic Village, which has now been renamed East Village.

“The opening of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is not the end of the transformation story,” said Hone. “We are building a new heart of east London creating jobs, building new homes, and bringing in investment, culture and education with partners like the Victoria and Albert Museum and University College London. It is a truly exciting time for all Londoners and we encourage people to come and see Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park for themselves.”

“Nothing had really been done on this scale before,” Tom Jones, principal of Populous, the practice that designed London 2012’s temporary venues, told delegates at International Sport Event Management Conference in London.

“There was a significant amount of temporary venue work going on at golf championships, temporary music festivals and those sorts of things, but this was quite unique.”

London 2012’s venue masterplan was not just unique; it was nothing short of revolutionary. Historically, the majority of Olympic Games venues would be built to last, but designed with the requirements of the short-term event in mind. This meant a relatively small amount of temporary overlay was required; it also resulted in a legacy of underused venues.

London 2012 subverted this norm. Only six of London 2012’s venues were new and permanent. The remainder consisted of existing world-class venues like Wembley Stadium, Wimbledon and Lords, supplemented by more than 20 temporary venues.

“We had a very high dependence on temporary structures because of the ‘no white elephants’ approach – not building where there was no legacy use,” explains James Bulley, CEO of Trivandi and former director of venues and infrastructure at the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG).

While this was clearly a revolution in terms of sustainability, it transferred huge responsibility onto the organising committee. “London delivered more temporary structures that Sydney, Athens and Beijing put together. That is a big shift; it puts massive onus on the organising committee to deliver substantial temporary structures.”

LOCOG delivered more than 250,000 temporary seats for the London Games, all of which now have been taken down. A 23,000 seat arena was built in Greenwich Park for the equestrian events, plus a 15,000 seat arena in Horse Guards. The basketball arena in the Olympic Park was also completely temporary.

While temporary overlay traditionally fell under the watch of the organising committee, it tended to be a much smaller project. Major infrastructure works would be handled by a separate authority, while the organising committee would focus primarily on selling tickets, running the sports events and overall operations.

In the case of London 2012, the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) delivered the permanent structures, but LOCOG also had a major build on its hands. According to Bulley, “it became very much focused and dependent on the very high risk elements of delivering construction.”

He questioned whether the split of work was reasonable. “We had the ODA delivering the permanent construction. Should they also have taken on the temporary construction? When you are looking at a city delivering immense infrastructure on this scale, whether that sits within the organising committee or outside it is something that should be thought through.”

The temporary nature of the structures meant that they had to be built quickly, and the elements were not on LOCOG’s side in the weeks running up to London 2012. “One of the key challenges was delivering temporary structures in greenfield sites in torrential weather,” said Bulley.

It wasn’t just the organising committee that was under strain. The temporary event commodity market was under pressure to deliver seats, tents, cabins, fences, temporary power supplies, barriers and much more.

“Under extreme pressure, the event supplier commodity market had to deliver huge amounts of infrastructure, which it perhaps wasn’t geared up to do so at the volume at which we needed to do it.”

Nonetheless, London 2012 raised the bar and the result is a faster, higher and stronger temporary infrastructure sector. Bulley points to advances in the seating industry in particular.

“We put in new standards for designs, because the market couldn’t supply what we were looking to achieve. A lot of the seating in London 2012 was new; it was manufactured for the event. We set new standards for safety and comfort, for example the 800mm seat-row depth, rather than the 720mm which you sometimes see in temporary stands.”

Jones adds: “We were keen to make the experience of going to a temporary venue as close as going to a permanent venue as possible, both in terms of comfort and quality.”

London 2012 also pushed the envelope when it came to sports surfaces. “We worked incredibly hard with the governing bodies and sports surface companies to deliver the fastest possible tracks and highest quality fields of play,” said Bulley.

Despite the large volumes and short timeframes, the local industry responded well to these demands. Bulley questions whether mega events in the immediate future will have the same resources to hand. “We had a very sophisticated event supply industry within Europe to tap into. For Brazil, it’s much more challenging.”

The big scale-down
Some of the permanent venues also had temporary aspects to them, with modular construction techniques being deployed to make them scalable. For example, the two “wings” that were plugged in to the aquatics centre to provide extra capacity during the Games are now being removed to leave the 1,500 to 2,000-seat community pool, in line with legacy plans.

Jones said: “The reduction in size of the aquatic centre, the opening of the copper box have all pretty much followed plan. The Olympic stadium is clearly different.”

The 80,000 seat stadium used in Games time was originally planned to be reduced to 25,000 seats, with a permanent athletics track. Bulley said: “We went to the market and said would a Premiership football club be prepared to take the stadium on? That was not the case at the time, so we followed the athletics legacy.”

After much wrangling, the stadium has been determined as the home ground of West Ham United. Having a top flight football club as a tenant will help to ensure regular custom in the Queen Elizabeth Park, as the Olympic Park will be known. “If you can retain it as a large facility it’s a much preferable solution,” said Bulley.

However, it does necessitate major changes. “We are managing to keep a significant amount of the structure,” said Jones. “When we were doing the original design we were trying to keep as much flexibility as possible. But clearly if the legacy use changes, then that is going to create challenges afterwards.”

These challenges include removing seating in the lower tier and extending the roof. The promise of an athletics legacy is also being honoured alongside the West Ham tenancy. “As the Olympic stadium, it will have to serve other uses than football,” said Bulley.

The revised designs for the stadium include a retractable lower tier that reveals will reveal the athletics track for events such as the World Athletics Championships, which the venue will host in 2017.

Between July and September last year, the Olympic and Paralympic Games brought competitions in 26 sports across 34 venues and 10,500 athletes from 204 countries to London. A total workforce of around 200,000 people, including more than 6,000 staff, 70,000 volunteers and 100,000 contractors, were involved in the Games.

Effective transport had long been recognised as an essential factor for a successful London 2012 Games. Before the Games began, some critics argued that London’s transport system was already strained and would not cope with the extra demands associated with hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

However, as a result of a comprehensive programme of transport upgrades and detailed planning in advance of the Games, excellent operational performance during the Games, and changes in travel behaviour by regular travellers, transport performed very well and made a vital contribution to the success of the Games.

Faster, higher, stronger
Almost GBP 6.5 billion was invested in transport improvements around the Olympic Park and across London, all delivered well before the Games began. The upgrades were well needed: London 2012 saw record attendance at events.

During the Olympic Games, there were 7.4 million ticketed spectators (6.25 million in London), including 2.8 million spectators at Olympic Park venues alone. The Paralympic Games sold out for the first time in their history, with 2.7 million ticket sales, including 100,000 non-event tickets. Record numbers of spectators also viewed the road events across London and the South East, with a total of 1.8 million estimated to have attended.

During London 2012 London’s public transport delivered 62 million journeys on London Underground – up 35 per cent on normal levels. Tuesday, 7 August was the busiest day in the Tube’s history, with 4.57 million passengers, while Sunday 5 August saw 78 per cent more passengers than a normal Sunday in 2011. There was a 27 per cent reduction in the impact of service disruption during the Olympic Games, measured in terms of lost customer hours.

The Docklands Light Railway (DLR) saw almost 6.9 million journeys over the Olympic Games – up by over 100 per cent on normal levels. Over 500,000 journeys on a single day were made for the first time on Friday 3 August. During both the Olympic and Paralympic Games, reliability on the DLR was 99 per cent.

London Overground saw around 6.4 million journeys during the Olympic Games – up 26 per cent on normal 2012 levels and up 54 per cent on 2011 levels. Reliability on the London Overground was 98 per cent.

London Buses carried 92 million passenger trips across the 17 days of the Olympic Games, running 23.2 million km during the Olympic Games, 98 per cent of schedule.

Traffic flows in central and inner London were down by 16.3 per cent in the AM peak and 9.4 per cent in the PM peak on normal levels during the Olympic Games. Serious and severe disruption was also down by 20 per cent during the Games.

VIPs go public
One of the areas that caused the most concern before the Games was the Olympic Route Network (ORN) and the proposed ‘VIP’ lanes or ‘Games lanes’ for athletes and officials. These Games lanes were in effect temporary priority routes to enable athletes and officials to get to the Games swiftly. They were only implemented when and where required and were strictly enforced.

But because officials and athletes used public transport much more than expected, the flow of Olympic family vehicles were typically 30-40 per cent below LOCOG’s pre-Games predictions. As a result, TfL was able to actively manage the ORN using roadside variable-messaging signs, with around 60 per cent of Games lanes remaining open to general traffic during the Olympic Games and around 70 per cent during the Paralympic Games.

People power
The transportation system was not all about vehicular movements. TfL provided a network of new cycling and walking routes, especially in East London; 15,000 free cycle parking spaces at competition venues; a further 1,500 free cycle parking spaces in central London for commuters; and free cycle maintenance at venues for spectators.

At sites across London, the number of pedestrians counted was 7 per cent higher during the Olympic Games and 18 per cent higher during the Paralympic Games, compared with the same period in 2011. Measurements on bridges over the Thames during the Olympic Games indicated 20 per cent more cyclists and 22 per cent more people on foot, compared with the previous fortnight.

In central London the figures showed 29 per cent more cyclists, and in east London 62 per cent more cyclists and 158 per cent more pedestrians, indicating large increases in the areas most affected by the Games. Barclays Cycle Hire had 642,000 hires over the Olympic Games – 44 per cent more than the first two weeks of July – and a further 442,000 hires over the Paralympic Games. Over the whole of July, Barclays Cycle Hire saw more than 1 million hires for the first time, while the highest ever daily total of 47,000 hires was achieved on 26 July.