Stratford-upon-Thames

Stratford in east London has for years been an area of unobtrusive desolation. It was too far from the Docklands to have benefited from the Canary Wharf development in the early 1990s and neither was it the first choice for accommodation for those working in the City or living to the west of it. During the day, parents use their children’s pushchairs as weapons to vie for space in the ludicrously cramped shopping centre; when night falls, skateboarding teenagers hang tough outside McDonald’s and KFC.

Since 6 July, though, there has been a buzz about Stratford. It is fair to say that the majority of the world-weary locals doubted that they would win the right to host the 2012 Olympic Games, and so victory has come as both surprise and boost to their spirits. Suddenly, Stratford is the jewel in the crown of the Thames Gateway and the most important development in the country over the next seven years. The local mood is changing.

Indeed, it would be very difficult for Stratford’s residents to ignore development on such a massive scale. It’s not only the Olympic Village, a large part of the £1.7bn Olympic Park, that will transform Stratford. The International Station itself is a vast structure – the CTRL will emerge from tunnels into a box 1 km long, 50 m wide and 15-20 m deep. Surrounding this, on 73 ha of former railway land, will be the Stratford City development of shops, offices and housing which will draw £4bn of investment and create more than 7000 homes and 34,000 jobs for the region.

Sir Robin Wales, the mayor of the borough of Newham, is in understandably ebullient form, and it’s not just because he’s fresh from showing the Queen around Stratford’s development sites or appearing on the television to talk about the Olympics. Wales likes chatting about the CTRL, which is unsurprising given that he was one of the leading figures who fought for it in the late 1990s when its future was threatened by a £1bn funding gap.

As leader of the council, he got Newham to link up with other local authorities, including Camden and Dartford, and transport groups such as the Railway Society. Together they formed a lobby group called the Fast Tracks Europe alliance, and by 2001 Wales had won his case with the announcement that a station would be built at Stratford.

Connecting east London to the Continent: two views of the vast Stratford International Station

To prove it, when IOC members visited in February this year, the bid team took them through the tunnel in Land Rovers: “I think they were impressed by whizzing along between Stratford and King’s Cross in such a short space of time. That exciting shuttle service took us over the top,” says Wales.

To Wales, the importance of CTRL is clear: “We wouldn’t have won the Olympics without it,” he declares. When the International Olympic Committee was drawing up its shortlist of cities for the games, it was critical of London’s transport links. But Newham argued that transport was actually one of the strong points of the bid. Submitted in November 2004 the bid book boasted that £250m Hitachi bullet trains, operating on London’s first new rail line for more than a hundred years, would move 25,000 spectators every hour from King’s Cross to the Olympic site in Stratford. The journey on the “Olympic Javelin” would take a mere seven minutes – three times faster than the Tube. To prove it, when IOC members visited in February this year, the bid team took them through the tunnel in Land Rovers: “I think they were impressed by whizzing along between Stratford and King’s Cross in such a short space of time. That exciting shuttle service took us over the top,” says Wales.

CTRL itself has benefited from its importance to the Olympic bid – those bullet trains weren’t included in the £5.2bn budget but the government was persuaded to buy them to impress the Olympic committee. This means that the CTRL will be running at up to 140 mph from as early as 2009. The ripples from CTRL will spread much wider than the Olympics, though. For the council, the more important goal is the long-term regeneration of the area. Council studies showed that in the 1990s recession, there were 130,000 unemployed people within five miles of the Stratford rail lands site. Newham council is determined that this situation never recur. Unemployment presently stands at 6.5%, and if the UK were plunged into another recession, Newham would undoubtedly suffer disproportionately.

CTRL is the key to building up Newham’s economic resilience. The council decided to use the project to release development land to create a new urban centre, and with it prosperity and jobs. “We didn’t just want a station and a railway line, we wanted a comprehensive flagship for development,” says Steven Hoier, Newham council’s strategic policy co-ordinator. “That’s the exciting thing.”

The construction of CTRL required London & Continental Railways to clear some 50 ha that until recently contained only ugly freight and maintenance depots. Boring the tunnel also meant excavating 2.4 million m3 of sand and soil, which was used to raise the land above the flood plain.

Under the CTRL agreement, LCR will develop the area and pay off some of the debt it had accrued on the £5.5bn project. Along with development partners Stanhope and Chelsfield, it submitted a planning application in 2003 for a five-phase commercial, retail and housing project called Stratford City, due for completion in 2020. Chelsfield was later replaced by Australian contractor Multiplex, Australian developer Westfield and investors the Reuben Brothers, forming Stratford City Developments, but despite this, and a recent tussle with the London Development Agency over the site of the Olympic stadium, the plan remains the same. The area due for regeneration will cover 13.5 million ft2.

After five years of working on Stratford City from 8am to “whenever I’m able to get home”, Wenlock is well placed to assess the mood of the community. He says he has noticed a change in Stratford over the past 18 months: “There has been extensive community consultation all the way through the plans for Stratford City, but recently people keep telling us: ‘This is great! When is it going to get started?’”

Joy says he was concerned that this flashy new urban area could alienate Stratford’s existing residents, much as the people of Poplar were isolated from Canary Wharf, even though it was just a few hundred yards away from them.

The scheme got planning permission last year, but at present the consortium of Stanhope-Multiplex-Westfield-LCR is waiting for Union Railways to finish work on the CTRL station. Work will begin on Stratford City in late 2006.

The first phase will contain 4 million ft2 of mixed-use space, including 900 houses, and is due for completion in 2009. There will be 2 million ft2 of retail space alone – more than at Bluewater or Lakeside, the South-east’s shopping meccas. David Joy, LCR’s planning director, says Stratford City Developments is in discussions with retailers to fill vacancies for three anchor department stores.

There will also be 1 million ft2 of office space, and the consortium hopes to attract companies looking for headquarters, rather than competing with the City for lawyers or bankers. The idea is that phase one will form the basis of a new city, with housing, retail and a small-scale commercial zones. The real economic drive will take place with the creation of an employment hub – 5 million ft2 of office space – by 2017. There’s another benefit of hosting the Olympics: the finished development was to have had 4850 new homes, of which 1455 were to have been affordable, but the need to accommodate the 17,000 athletes of the Olympic Village has increased this by 2300 to more than 7000.

Joy says he was concerned that this flashy new urban area could alienate Stratford’s existing residents, much as the people of Poplar were isolated from Canary Wharf, even though it was just a few hundred yards away from them. “The idea is to link existing areas with the Stratford City development,” Joy says. “We are spilling over development to the rest of Stratford so that residents do not feel cut off from it.” For example, Stratford City is talking to Land Securities about improving the grim Stratford shopping centre.

Another way in which LCR has been keeping Stratford residents on side is by organising daily visits to the CTRL site. This has been targeted at schoolchildren, about 1200 of whom visit the site every term. And many of those children are likely to get jobs on the site in coming years as the contract stipulates that a small percentage of workers have to reside in the local area.

Construction aside, local children will soon have many more options than hanging around fast food joints. As local teacher Andrew Webster says, “The rail link and the Olympics are going to be great for the kids I teach – it cannot help but inspire them.