Olympics Anish Kapoor tower hopes to attract 1m visitors a year

By Hackney Citizen | Friday 7 January 2011 at 08:14

This article titled “Olympics Anish Kapoor tower hopes to attract 1m visitors a year” was written by Owen Gibson, for The Guardian on Friday 7th January 2011 00.05 UTC

The body responsible for the legacy of the Olympic Park after the 2012 Games has set a target of 1 million visitors a year for the Anish Kapoor-designed structure that will tower over it, claiming it will become one of London’s most loved attractions. Under the terms of the invitation to tender launched today, companies will be invited to operate the attraction on a lease of around 10 years. The Olympic Park Legacy Company aims to appoint an operator by June. Andrew Altman, the chief executive of OPLC, unveiled the target as he began seeking operators for the venues left behind after the Games.

The 114m tall Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond designed sculpture, which will cost £22.3m and is being mainly funded by ArcelorMittal, will be the tallest sculpture in London when it is complete and has already divided opinion.

Altman said he believed it could generate up to £10m a year in revenue through ticket sales, catering, private functions, retail and merchandise. Under a profit share scheme, a proportion will go back into the upkeep of the park and staging events.

“You’ve got two platforms at 80 metres high that will have gallery space, café space, banqueting space. There could be corporate use, community use, a gallery. It will be different in the daytime and the night time,” he said.

“And it also has to tell the story of the engineering of it and it can also be a part of telling the story of the Olympics,” he said.

Its supporters hope it will become as iconic as the Eiffel Tower, another semi-permanent structure that became a key part of the skyline, and an enthusiastic Boris Johnson has already come up with a host of monikers including the “mutant trombone” and the “hubble bubble”.

But critics have already claimed it will destroy the vistas over the Park, as it towers over its neighbouring structures, and come to be seen as a monument to the Johnson’s hubris.

Altman said he had no such worries and believed the attraction would help differentiate the more urban south end of the Park, where open air canal-side plazas will host concerts and festivals, from the leafier north end where thousands of new family houses will be built.

“It’s a piece of engineering that should become this great destination. You can go to the top and get a great view. It will mark the whole landscape,” he said.

Altman believes it will help attract the 14 million plus shoppers expected to visit the new Westfield centre into the Park.

“If you look across the City, you’ll have the London Eye, the Gherkin and the BT Tower. Now you’ll have a landmark in the east, that will mark a whole new point in a city growing in the east,” he said.

“Boris was totally right about this. He was right to say we needed reasons for people to come to this Park that were different. There’s got to be something really special about this other than the fact the Games were here,” he said.

Contracts to operate the Zaha Hadid designed Aquatics Centre, which will house 50 metre pools that can be used by the community and elite athletes, the multi-use arena that will host handball during the Games and the operation of the park will follow.

The contracts herald a pivotal year for the OPLC, which will oversee the transformation of the Park during the year until it reopens as Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in summer 2013.

Altman said he was pleased with the backing that the OPLC had received from the coalition government for what has been called the most important regeneration project of the next 25 years.

He also said it had received an enthusiastic response from developers to plans for up to 11,000 new homes, most of them aimed at families, that were unveiled in October last year despite the ongoing gloom in the property market.

“The thing that will make or break it is around the public space, making sure all the pieces fit, the marketing of it,” said Altman.

The next landmark decision will be whether to choose Tottenham Hotspur or West Ham United as the tenant of the Olympic Stadium, likely to be reduced to a capacity of 55,000 following the Games.

West Ham, backed by Newham Council and concert promoter Live Nation, has promised to retain the running track while Spurs, in conjunction with O2 operator AEG, has argued that it makes better commercial sense to remove it and offer an athletics legacy elsewhere.

It had originally been hoped that the OPLC would confer preferred bidder status on one of the clubs by the end of the month, but that now looks unlikely. It has promised to come to a final decision by the end of the financial year in April.

“You have got a real competition with two really serious bids. It’s a good place to be. The negotiation is intense and I think it’s really positive. It’s all about bringing activity and vibrancy to the Park and using it as much as possible,” said Altman.

It is also looking for long term tenants for the cavernous press and broadcasting centres on the Hackney side of the Park.

Local politicians hope that it can become a media and technology hub, an idea enthusiastically backed by prime minister David Cameron, but Altman conceded it was “ambitious”.”The first year for us will be critical. It will set the tone and the value of the Park. When you open the Park, it’s got to have momentum. The lesson from regeneration projects around the world is that the first years are really important,” said Altman, appointed in May 2009 after leading successful regeneration projects in Philadelphia and Washington DC. “That’s why things like programming events and unique attractions like the Orbit are actually really important.”

• This article was amended on 7 January 2011. The original said that the Kapoor tower would be the tallest structure in London. This has been amended.

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