Frustration fallout after EastEnders declines Olympic Park move
EastEnders this week: Faith has found herself homeless. Photograph: BBC
Five days after news broke that the Queen Vic, Albert Square and the entire EastEnders world would not be relocating from Elstree in Hertfordshire to, well, the East End in the form of the Olympic Park broadcast centre after the Games, frustration fallout still pollutes the atmosphere.
“Everything possible was done to help the BBC,” sighed one disappointed insider. “This had been going on for the best part of a year. They were happy with the financing. Mark Thompson [the director general] really wanted it to happen. There were architect’s drawings, everything. City Airport had even agreed to divert flights because they were worried about noise when they were filming scenes outside.”
According to this account a series of technical objections were raised and addressed, raised and addressed, raised and addressed until, finally, the objection-raisers prevailed. “It was something to do with a wall being in the wrong place,” said my source, still frayed from the whole affair. The BBC, no doubt, sees the matter differently but the blow of its withdrawal is the heavier for coming rather late.
The OPLC must now go ahead with formally marketing both the 62,000 square metres of the broadcast centre and the 29,000 of the neighbouring press centre without a prestigious “anchor tenant” in the larger of the two to make the whole lot seem more appealing. There’s a stonking great car park too.
I’m told the Beeb had been negotiating to take about one third of the ground floor of the broadcast centre, plus outside space. It was stressed to me that the building has attracted other desirable suitors after “expressions of interest” were sought a year ago, but that these had necessarily been somewhat neglected in the effort to get Auntie in the bag.
In the freesheet of Hackney council, which is desperate for the buildings to house a media hub and creative industries standing companionably across the water from the art galleries of Hackney Wick, local mayor Jules Pipe wryly notes that the BBC can make Doctor Who in Cardiff but not EastEnders in East London. The park is even to have the postcode E20, same as the fictional Walford where EastEnders is set. The full story has yet to emerge, but it does seem a shame that the Corporation deal didn’t go through.
Meanwhile, others bits of the post-Games landscape are starting to take shape in the mist. Next month, the site for the first of those five future neighbourhoods that were named by the public will be taken to the property market to see who wants to buy. It’s the gestating Chobham Manor, which will lie between the athletes village and the velodrome (see the trio of turquoise blocks in the north-east of the park on the “development areas” version of the OPLC’s interactive map).
The OPLC confirms that the possibility of the Chobham Manor site being made a community land trust is being explored “very seriously,” though nothing’s been decided yet. The attraction of CLTs is that they separate the land value from that of the buildings constructed on it, which enables the price of properties to be held down to genuinely affordable levels for generations. Around 800 homes will eventually be built there. It seems that Ian Beale and Dot Branning will not be among the residents.
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