London legacy: bridge-building in Hackney Wick
The Hackney Wick Village barbecue area beside the River Lea Navigation Canal. Photograph: Dave Hill
Residents of Wick Village in the Hackney Wick area of east Hackney, can look across the River Lea Navigation Canal from the walkway along the side of it and see the blank face of the Olympic Park press centre looking back. It didn’t used to be that way. Before the vast 2012 land clearance began their view was of a green space known as Arena Fields, which lay just to the south of the legendary Hackney Marshes.
Then came years of construction work, bringing with it noise, dust, inconvenience and some distress to the village and other residential areas nearby. The consolation, say Wick Villagers Dee O’Connell and Ian White, was a promise by the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) that the walkway and a grassy, tree-lined continuation of it that runs behind the playground wall of neighbouring Gainsborough primary school would be improved for communal benefit.
The little stretch behind the school is of particular importance to the residents, not all of whom have gardens. A secure future of secluded waterfront barbecues was envisaged, restoring the space for the use it was put to until around 2010 when vandals damaged the lighting, making the space unsafe. But Dee, Ian and, it seems, many of their neighbours fear that the walkway and erstwhile barbecue spot will instead become a public thoroughfare serving one end of a footbridge that would span the canal and provide public access to the post-Games park.
What we have here is a hyperlocal tale that illuminates larger issues about the benefits or otherwise to local communities of the Olympic Park’s development in the years to come, and how those issues are managed by the powers that be.
It’s a tricky situation. There’s a strong argument for building a bridge. The catering building serving the press centre and the much larger broadcast centre behind it will be demolished after the Games to make way for new playing fields for the fast-expanding Gainsborough school, and these would eventually be shared with a new school on the park side of the canal serving one of the park’s eventual new neighbourhoods. The bridge would replace one that had previously connected the school to the opposite bank, until it fell into disrepair and was demolished four years ago.
The Wick Village objectors recognise this need for the bridge, but think it should terminate within Gainsborough school’s playground – as the old one did – and be for pupils’ use alone. It’s the possibility of general public access that worries them. Dee and Ian are young, relative newcomers but say that many fellow residents who’ve lived there since Wick Village was built in the early 1990s – and in some cases in the tower blocks it replaced – are elderly, frail and worried that their quiet niche will become a place that droves of park visitors pass through or, worse, that antisocial elements hang about in.
There’s a complicated backstory here. The original planning application for a new bridge was approved in 2007, under the first Olympic Park masterplan. It was drawn up with Gainsborough school’s needs principally in mind, but included a provision for the bridge to possibly become accessible to the general public at a later date.
The London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), now the planning authority for the park and some surrounding areas, explains that it has inherited this planning permission and is legally obliged to abide by it. However, it stresses that this doesn’t mean that the bridge will be accessible to the public straight away or indeed ever, only that consideration of “how public access could be facilitated in the future,” would be included in the determination of the application its has submitted to the ODA jointly with Hackney Council. It adds that there would be consultation with residents if and when the process of making the bridge accessible to the public went ahead.
But this doesn’t meet the objectors’ fears. They say that not only would the possibility of full public access remain but that designing the bridge in a way that would allow for this in the future would cause them a separate problem by intruding on the barbecue area. An access ramp would be installed along the outside wall of the playground they say, taking up a wide strip of the space and requiring the removal of the trees along that side of it.
Another twist in the dispute is that some of the original residents say that the barbecue area was bought from British Waterways at the time of Wick Village’s birth by the tenant management organisation, which is responsible for some aspects of its running, including repairing it and keeping it clean. However, no formal records of such a purchase seem to exist.
Hackney Council applied successfully for “adverse possession” of the land in 2010 (under the same legislation that grants rights to squatters). I understand that it and LLDC consider that they’ve minimised the space the access ramp would take up and would undertake to re-position or replace the existing barbecue facilities, plants and seating as well as instal a railing on the canal side to make it safer for people using the area.
A public access bridge is also included in Hackney’s planning policy for the area, the Hackney Wick area action plan and there have been public consultations on that. But whatever the pros and cons of the actual proposals, an underlying problem of trust seems to remain. Dee and Ian say there’s a feeling among residents that the ODA and Hackney Council haven’t always made clear enough to what the implications of the bridge for Wick Village might be, and are now not being as helpful as they should.
At least 34 of Wick Village’s 120 households have sent off written objections to the proposals, which have been submitted for determination to the relevant committees of the ODA and Hackney Council on, respectively, 23 July and 12 September. This is not at all the situation they thought they’d up in back when thought something would be done to make up for all the disruption and change that has occurred.
A closing thought. This might be a very small, very local Olympics legacy story, but, whatever has gone before, the authorities should do all in their power to bring about an ending to it that leaves local people as happy as possible. That, after all, is what legacy is meant to do, and not only in Wick Village.
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