Groundbreakers

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QUEEN ELIZABETH OLYMPIC PARK – A LANDSCAPE OF CHANGE

The Park is ever changing. As you walk around you will notice new buildings, new housing, new schools, workplaces, hotels, cultural centres and even a new university campus as the London 2012 legacy materialises on the ground. But change is something of an old fashioned story for this site. The area now occupied by QEOP has a long history of change , of pioneering new forms of enterprise and responding creatively to the larger economic forces at work in London and the world.

The transformation of Stratford from a small rural hamlet to a railway town built around a concentration of ‘dirty’ industry in the Victorian period was experienced initially as a dramatic disruption of long established patterns of life and labour , brilliantly depicted in the Pandaemonium sequence of the 2012 Olympics Opening ceremony. Equally , the long transition of East London from the heart of Industry and Empire to the hub of a global information and services based economy marked a no less profound unsettling of East Enders traditional ways of life, some of which is still represented in the nation’s most popular TV soap.