The £1.3bn transformation of the historic venue in west London has added entertainment, hospitality and workspace to an already congested site. Thomas Lane visits one of the capital’s most complex construction projects
When the ExCeL London opened in 2000, the axis of the capital’s large exhibition venues shifted decisively to the east. Although remotely located in the Royal Docks, it offered capacity for up to 68,750 visitors, a conference centre, parking, a large marshaling yard and drive in access for HGV’s. By contrast London’s traditional exhibition venues, Earls Court, now demolished, and Olympia were smaller, tired and lacked the space and facilities of the newcomer in the east.
Now Olympia is fighting back with a £1.3bn redevelopment which will eclipse much of what ExCeL has to offer other than huge amounts of space. In addition to the three existing exhibition halls, it will include a new theatre – London’s largest since the National Theatre opened in 1976 – a live music venue and lots of new bars and restaurants unique to Olympia.
“The ambition for Olympia is to create one of London’s most dynamic destinations, a place where culture, entertainment, hospitality, business and public life come together in one iconic setting,” explains Michael Volkert, the chief operating officer of Olympia Estates.
Unlike those at ExCeL, some of these bars and restaurants are very upmarket, with others catering to more modest tastes. And towering over the development is a distinctive Heatherwick Studio-designed office which embraces Heathwick’s contention that modern buildings do not have to be boring.
In plan it looks like five digits closed together on a hand with the little finger and thumb stepped back from the three central sections. In section the fingers step up from the Hammersmith Road side of the scheme and down again from the third finger to the one adjacent to the main exhibition space at Olympia, the Grand Hall. This reduces the massing of the block, with the rounded ends of the fingers distinguishing it from standard orthogonal office typology while offering occupiers 180° views over London.
The idea is that this will transform Olympia from a place where people go solely for an exhibition to a destination offering entertainment, food and drink as well as a place to work and stay. “We’re transforming Olympia from a traditional events venue into a destination with energy throughout the day and into the evening, where people come not only for exhibitions or performances, but to spend time and experience everything the area has to offer,” Volkert says.
“Alongside theatres, music venues, hotels, restaurants and new public spaces, carefully integrated workspace will help create a lively, active neighbourhood that feels relevant and connected every day of the week.”
Accommodation is offered by a Citizen M hotel built over the side of the National Hall; the small sister of the Grand Hall, on Hammersmith Road, and a Hyatt hotel at the other end of the scheme on the former site of one of London’s first multi-storey carparks. Although the hotels will appeal to people exhibiting or visiting an exhibition, the entertainment and food and beverage offer should appeal to locals given the thin, nondescript nature of alternatives in the neighbourhood.
Music lovers will welcome the British Airways Arc, a 3,800-seat venue, as – with the exception of the Eventium Apollo, which is a mixed entertainment venue – the area has lacked a large music venue since the Hammersmith Palais closed in 2007. The British Airways Theatre, with its 1,575 capacity, will also be much bigger than other local venues.
Apart from Olympia Way – the open space between the exhibition halls on one side and the District line on the other – the site has always been fully built out. Two very long escalators sandwiched between the National and Grand halls provide the clue as to how all these extra facilities have been shoe-horned onto the site: these escalators take people up to third-floor level to the top of the brick facades of the exhibition halls on Olympia Way.
Most of the new development has taken place at this level or above apart from the standalone theatre on the other side of the scheme. People will step off the top of the escalator onto an avenue between the exhibition halls below.
Called the Canopy – and as the name implies – the avenue is protected by a distinctive curved glass canopy which echoes the barrel-vaulted glazed roofs of the exhibition halls on either side. The canopy features pleated glazing which references that on the end elevation of the Grand Hall.
This space is lined with restaurants, bars and a food hall and leads to a modest square with outdoor seating space. The fat rounded ends of the office fingers cantilever over this space, with the main office reception accessible from the avenue on the other side of the square.
The entrance to the music hall, which is built over the two-storey West Hall, is at the end of this avenue and there is alternative access from Hammersmith Road via stairs.
The office features a generous reception with the pleated theme continuing in wood for the wall finish. The reception doubles up for the upper floor auditorium of the new two storey international convention centre. This sits behind the retained facade of the former Olympia Central, an example of early modern movement architecture on Hammersmith Road.
Below is another, larger auditorium, business lounges and breakout spaces. The standalone theatre behind the National Hall is the only new-build element in the scheme.
The architectural approach
The masterplan for the site was jointly developed by SPPARC and Heatherwick Studio, with each architect taking responsibility for individual buildings. For example, SPPARC designed the British Airways ARC and the Hyatt hotel and Heatherwick Studio the British Airways Theatre, the office building and the canopy.
As the largest building on the development, the office acts as a landmark for the whole scheme and, in keeping with Thomas Heatherwick’s contention that buildings should not be boring, breaks with standard orthogonal office typology with its five rounded fingers and stepped massing.
Carlos Parrago-Bolero, Heatherwick Studio’s project lead, explains that the practice takes a three-stage approach to scale: Firstly the scale of the city, then the street and finally the scale of the door – the objects people interface with. He says the office building was positioned to minimise its impact on the street.
“We placed the tower, which was the tallest element in the scheme, set back from the street. So, if you walk down Hammersmith Road, you hardly feel the presence of the tall building because of the stepping back, which was a conscious urban gesture.”
He adds that breaking the building into five fingers and stepping these up to the central finger on both sides helped to soften the mass too. An architectural flourish is provided by pleating the facade glazing.
As Parrago-Bolero explains: “The standard response would be a flat, 14-storey building. What we did is pleat the facade, which is an inspiration from the Grand Hall which has a pleated glass facade. We used the gesture of pleated glass to bring detail into those long facades.”
Parrago-Bolero stresses that every attempt was made to keep the costs down on this facade and cites the example of the distinctive canopy over the avenue at high level as an example of how hard the practice works to ensure its designs are affordable. He says that eliminating the canopy was an option at one point because of rising costs, so every effort was made to keep these under control as the canopy was such an important part of the scheme.
“The canopy was a key item. If you are at street level, you are six to eight metres below the roof of the buildings. So you need this icon, something to make you realise there is something up on the roof and pull people up there,” he says.
The practice convinced the client of the importance of the canopy and, by “rationalising it to the bone” to cut costs, ensured it was retained. Off-the-shelf tubular elements were used for the canopy frame and the glass sizes rationalised to make it easier to construct. Oversized capping was used to make it easier to manage variations in the tolerances during construction.
Construction
The scheme has been delivered by Laing O’Rourke and has not been without its challenges. Problems on the job are believed to have contributed to the contractor’s worst-ever results when it posted a £288m pre-tax loss in November 2023.
There have been several internal layout design alterations, the most significant of which was changing the plan to build Olympia’s own office behind the retained facade of the original Central Hall to the international convention centre. Olympia Estates declined to comment on costs.
Unsurprisingly, the constrained, urban nature of the site – including working over existing buildings which had be kept operational – has made this job particularly challenging, as Olympia construction director Tony Palgrave explains: “We had a combination of vehicles for the events that were running and construction vehicles. We had to think about how we could manage that without impacting local residents and neighbours.”
Careful delivery scheduling for events and construction was essential to keep the site running smoothly. This included employing a holding yard a couple of miles away where vehicles could wait on busy days to be called up to the project for their allocated slot.
“At peak, we had 16 tower cranes up across the development so you can imagine the amount of pick points that we needed around the perimeter,” says Allan Cameron, Laing O’Rourke’s project director. “We used the holding point to ensure that we could safely offload vehicles because the worst thing is one that turns up to site and sits there for too long. We used the facility to make sure that we can get those vehicles in and out as quickly as possible.”
Palgrave explains that six new structures were being worked on simultaneously at the same time as Olympia was hosting some 70 events a year. “One of the first challenges I had when I joined the project was to develop a way that we could run events at the same time as we could we could build all of these buildings on top of the other buildings,” he says.
Laing O’Rourke is distinguished from other contractors with its directly employed workforce and focus on design for manufacture and assembly aligned with sophisticated digital design and planning tools. Palgrave says this was one of the reasons for awarding them the contract.
“It gives us a lot more certainty about what’s going to come out the other end, which was one of the big deciding points for us at the beginning,” he says.
The digital tools were central to ensuring the job ran smoothly. “It was very important for the events team to understand what the site would look like for each of those events and the route for the public,” Cameron explains.
“In essence we have built the project twice. We built it once with the digital model and used an immersive suite, which is the digital model available in a 3D room and used it to liaise with Tony [Palgrave] and the client team and explain our plan and sequencing. This allowed us to see any unforeseen issues and plan accordingly.”
Palgrave adds that noise levels from each event were predicted in advance and four categories created, with the idea that construction work noise levels could not exceed that from an event. This allowed the team to plan construction activities with equivalent noise levels.
Each event is accompanied by a few assembly and dismantling days on either side of an event during which noise was less of an issue. Palgrave says there was some resequencing of noisy construction work during that time.
“Through really close programming and management, we were able to move those noisy activities to either side of the key quiet periods,” he says. Parts of the office building cantilever over the Grand Hall roof so part of the exhibition hall had to be cordoned off during exhibitions for health and safety reasons.
The first element to be built was the energy centre located between Pillar Hall and the Great Hall. This provides heat and power to the site and was built under a separate contract from the rest of the job with work starting in March 2020. Work also included piling for the canopy structure, the Citizen M hotel and parts of the office building where columns needed to go through the National and Great halls.
Palgrave says this was one of the few upsides of the pandemic as this ruled out any exhibitions. “I don’t mean to sound callous, but it was a benefit to us because we had a lot of piling work to do in the existing halls and in the basement below the Citizen M hotel,” he says. “The original plan was to do the work in between the 70-odd events that we run a year, but we were able to get in and crack on with the work.”
The work involved carefully cutting a hole in the existing slab, then piling. The new columns supporting the structures above are located by the existing balconies at the sides of the hall so do not impact on the exhibition space.
The complexity and scale of the job prompted the team to divide it into seven distinct projects each with their own construction and consultant team. Inevitably there was some crossover as some of the consultant team and Laing O’Rourke’s specialists were working across the whole project.
Cameron says the biggest challenge was instilling Laing O’Rourke’s working culture across seven very different projects; he says that a total of 31,000 people were inducted with 2,500 workers on site during the peak construction period. The digital model was used to manage the interfaces between each individual project.
Offsite manufacturing helped to reduce the number of workers needed onsite. The office building floor slabs were precast concrete and precast facade panels have been used for the theatre.
Twinwall panels were used for the cores in some of the buildings including the Citizen M hotel although the office core was jump-formed. The services were prefabricated including the risers and the energy centre components.
Care had to be taken not to disturb the foundations of the existing buildings. Top-down construction was used for the new-build International Convention Centre as this has a new basement. Palgrave says the integrity of the slab in the convention centre had to be maintained to stop the arch of the Grand Hall from spreading as this is anchored by a huge ground beam.
He adds that top-down construction was also used for the theatre as it was simpler to use one construction method for two adjacent buildings. And this had the advantage of saving time on the programme. The new basements will be used as a logistics centre for the completed development.
The office building features a different grid from the convention centre below, necessitating a big transfer structure at level two. The roof was taken off the existing West Hall and a new double-skinned, acoustically isolated concrete slab on heavy new columns constructed to ensure that sound from the new music hall did not leak out into the rooms below.
One building that did not need much work was the listed Pillar Hall, which features a grand, double-height space which has already opened as a restaurant and entertainment space. Downstairs is the very swish, hand-blocked wallpaper bar called Speakeasy.
The bars and restaurants lining the canopy open on 15 June with the music venue; the British Airways ARC opens a day later. Premier League Studios has taken space in the office and both hotels open in July leaving just the theatre to open next year. All of which should help to consolidate the axis shift of London’s exhibition centres back towards its traditional home on the west side of the capital.
Project team
Client Yoo Capital and Deutsche Finance International
Venues operator Olympia Estates
Architects Heatherwick Studio/SPPARC
Project manager/cost consultant Gardiner & Theobald
Structural engineer Robert Bird Group
M&E engineer Desco
Façade engineer Eckersley O’Callaghan
Contractor Laing O’Rourke
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