As you walk around Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park you will notice many new buildings, new housing, schools, workplaces, offices and hotels, even a new university campus and cultural quarter, as the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic legacy materialises on the ground. It is easy then to think that there was nothing much here before 2012, and indeed much of the official media coverage portrayed the site as a semi-derelict wasteland awaiting regeneration. In fact, the area now occupied by the Park has a long and complex history of human settlement, manufacture, and recreational use, as well as a changing population of plants and animals. In these ways the site has continually responded to the larger forces at work in London - and the world - over the past centuries.

The transformation of Stratford from a small rural hamlet to a railway town built around a concentration of ‘dirty’ industry in the Victorian period caused a dramatic disruption of long established pre-industrial patterns of life and labour, some of which adapted while many more disappeared and were replaced by new technologies of work and leisure.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen east London change once more from an industrial heartland to a cosmopolitan hub of global information and a predominantly services-based economy. The step change associated with the coming of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games has been a much more abrupt process, disrupting many patterns of East Enders’ established ways of life; some of these impacts are still being worked through and are weekly dramatized in the nation’s most popular TV soap, as East Enders adapt to the new circumstances and opportunities, and weigh up what has been gained and lost.

As always, the impact of change has been uneven. East London has one of the most socially and ethnically diverse populations in Britain and, over the last 150 years, its communities have found themselves at the forefront of many struggles to improve living and working conditions and establish more open and democratic institutions. Out of this has grown a vibrant local culture expressed in sport, popular music, theatre, and the arts.

In setting out to tell this story, The Groundbreakers online guide will unearth and bring to life some of the histories whose physical traces, like the rivers and tunnels which criss-cross the Park, are now largely forgotten or hidden from sight. Did you know that the site once contained a Roman bridge? A network of now lost waterways? An anti-aircraft gun emplacement? A sweet factory? A speedway and greyhound track whose popularity rivalled that of football in the 1950s? All these and more await you in this guide.

In digging down into this buried past we aim to show you its relevance to our lives today. For example, during the ‘Dig, Design and Demolish’ phase of Olympic Park construction, archaeologists discovered evidence of a prehistoric settlement beneath what is now the London Aquatics Centre on Carpenters Road. But archaeology is not just for professional archaeologists. In 2006, Paul and Gary, a father and son team of riggers, whose job it was to drill down for soil samples to help direct the giant boring machines driving two tunnels across the site, discovered coins, bottles, clay pipes, perfumes and shrapnel, each of which tell their own story about an aspect of the area’s past.

For Gary’s eighteenth birthday his dad made him a special version of a Monopoly board, with each site renamed to depict an event or situation that had occurred in and around the Park during its construction, each property acting as a prompt for the recounting of a story. You can access this material here.

We think that these stories are as much part of the 2012 legacy as the London Stadium, the ArcelorMittal Orbit, the Copper Box Arena and the Lee Valley Hockey and Tennis Centre. So too are the plants and animals, whose presence, and sometimes absence, has done so much to give this environment its distinctive character. A connecting thread is provided by the theme of ‘groundbreaking’, considered as both a disruptive material process in which capital, labour and technology interact with the non-human environment to transform the landscape, whether for better or worse, and as a statement about the collective human hopes and dreams invested in that enterprise. In bringing these two sides of the story together in a single conversation about the past, present and future of this site, we hope to live up to the project’s title.

The material in the guide is organised thematically, and within each theme, chronologically. Each theme has its own introduction and map. In addition there is a general map showing all the sites mentioned here and scattered throughout are nine Augmented Reality heritage hot spots, that have additional 3D models or presentations that can be viewed, along with this site, with a mobile device. The Augmented Reality hot spots are best experienced in the Park, but can also be experienced at home from our Resources page. There you will also find a 100+ page guidebook in PDF format for those who prefer a paper copy, to take with you on your walk or read up beforehand to help plan your visit.

The four themes are:

Fluid Histories traces the entangled flows of people, goods, water, electricity, and waste that have shaped the landscape.

Encampments and other dwellings documents patterns of human habitation and home making from the Bronze Age to the digital age and the impact they have had on the local environment.

Edgelands remade looks at the many ways the site and its inhabitants both human and non-human, have been transformed as it is excavated, engineered, polluted, demolished and re-built.

Level playing fields? examines changing patterns of local labour and leisure in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as communities struggle to improve their conditions of life, including through sport and leisure activities.

If you have enjoyed this guide, you may be interested in The Young Person’s Guide to QEOP, co-produced by the Living Maps Network.

  If you want to explore the history of the site in greater depth, each entry has suggestions for further reading and archives that were used by our researchers that you may wish to visit to see the original source materials.

The original idea emerged from research carried out by staff at the University of East London into the impact of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games on its local host communities in East London. It became clear from the many interviews carried out before, during and after the event that, whilst most welcomed the Games, many people were concerned that the complex and rich history of the area would be forgotten or ignored once the housing, workplaces and other amenities that existed here were demolished for constructing the new Park. In response we decided to put together a multimedia trail that would explore the rich heritage of the site from the earliest recorded times until the present. We succeeded in getting a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund for this purpose, but unfortunately before we could begin work, the University of East London decided it to close down the History and Heritage Studies department where the project was to be based. The project grant was then transferred to The Building Exploratory, a community-based charity concerned with environmental education. Work involving their volunteers, Discover Children’s Story Centre and local schools was begun in September 2018 but before it could be completed the Building Exploratory went into liquidation and so the project came to an abrupt halt. After the insolvency process The Livingmaps Network, which had been involved from the very outset, agreed with the Heritage Lottery Fund to take on the project in partnership with Hyperactive Developments and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, with additional financial support from the Foundation for Future London and the Raphael Samuel History Centre, brought the project to completion in its present multimedia format. The trail, map, guidebook and teaching resources were launched on 1st June, 2022 at a press launch hosted by the Park with various walks and talks organised throughout Newham Heritage Month.

LivingMaps was established in 2015 by a group of researchers, artist map makers and community campaigners. It has a strong commitment to participatory map making and has worked with many groups, as well as running workshops, a programme of live and online events, and an online journal.

Hyperactive Developments is an immersive and educational technology company led by Dr Atif Mohammed Ghani who brings 20 years of producing filmed and immersive content in the UK, probably best known for producing the East London set Ill Manors. His recent award-winning virtual reality project The Martha Street Experience has been playing marquee festival worldwide after its premiere at the BFI London Film Festival in 2020.Heritage 5G Ltd is an immersive development company with a focus on producing content for the heritage sector.

Heritage 5G is currently delivering projects with UCL Special Collections, London Metropolitan Archives, Canadian History Museum and others. Co-founder Jay Younes is an established immersive development Producer credited with designing and running immersive labs for 19,000 young people and adults throughout the south-east.

Toby Butler is a heritage and digital education consultant, and a public historian with a wide-ranging skill set developed in higher education, the third sector and the media industry. He has devised collaborative oral history projects in India, the USA, Wales and England. He has created oral history trails along the River Thames with the Museum of London and several London parks for local authorities. He has directed major oral history projects on the Royal Docks and the Bethnal Green disaster. Toby is currently a Reader in Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is leading a major AHRC funded project on the oral history of the environmental movement, and Director of LivingMaps Network. He is also a digital education consultant at Birkbeck, University of London and was a research fellow on the Mapping Museums project, which has created an online database and map of all the museums in the UK from 1960-present featuring his interviews with 57 museum founders.

Phil Cohen is an urban ethnographer, Emeritus Professor at the University of East London, and the research director of Livingmaps Network. Since the 1980’s he has carried out a series of research and educational projects working with communities in East London, documenting the impact of economic and demographic change on their livelihoods, life-styles and life stories. This work was brought together in On the Wrong Side of the Track: East London and the Post Olympics (2013). He co-edited a collection of legacy studies London 2012 and the Post Olympic City (2017). He has conducted many walking lecture tours around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Amongst his other publications are Archive That Comrade: Left Legacies and the counter culture of remembrance (2017) and Waypoints: towards an ecology of political mindfulness (Eyeglass Book 2019). See his website for further information.

Juliet Davis is interested in urban histories and the making of new urban futures, in the role of the London Olympics in transforming east London, and in theories of Urban Design. She published the book Dispersal: Picturing urban change with Historic England Publishing in 2017, focussing on the history of the Olympic Park. Current projects include a book for Bristol University Press entitled Care and the City: ethics of urbanism and a special issue of Planning Perspectives on Epidemics, Planning and the City. Juliet practiced architecture and urban design in London for ten years in London before entering academia in 2007, contributing to Eric Parry Architects’ regeneration of St. Martin in the Fields amongst other projects. She completed an AHRC-funded Ph.D at the London School of Economics’ Cities Programme in 2011 focussed on the early stages of planning London’s Olympic legacy.

David Dorrington is a software developer and game development academic at the University of Brighton. He has worked on a range of interactive learning projects.

Jonathan Gardner is an archaeologist and heritage researcher based at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. He has conducted extensive research on the relationship of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games to the city’s history and undertook a PhD on the Games and several other London ‘mega events’ between 2012 and 2017 at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. He has been involved with Groundbreakers since 2014; prior to that he worked as a professional archaeologist on construction sites including Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford between 2007 and 2008. His first book, A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events: from the Great Exhibition to London 2012, is out in May 2022 with UCL Press (open access and free to download here).

Neil Larkin is a local geography teacher with over 30 years’ experience of working with young people in Newham and Waltham Forest. During his career Neil has been an advisory teacher, Deputy Head teacher and senior officer for Children and Young People's Services, Neil has also successfully led over 100 fieldtrips to the Olympic Park in his role as tutor for East London Urban Geography and devised the accompanying teaching resources for this project.

The Livingmaps Network would like to thank the Senior Bees (particularly Elizabeth Pillar, Maggie Reeves, Bella Callaghan, Sue Thompson and Paul Higgins) and the University of East London students who carried out valuable research for this project, Carol Hughes, Nicola Cruttenden, Lila Tolui, Maria Pringipa and Ali Haddi; the staff of the Discover Children’s Story Centre, and the children and staff of the local Primary schools with whom they worked; Katie Russell for her co-ordination work in the early phase of the project and the students and staff of UCL who attended heritage tours and provided valuable feedback; and UCL East for providing Community Engagement seed funding for the two community workshops. We are deeply grateful to the various archives and websites who have given us permission to reproduce visual material, see the individual image credit for acknowledgement/source information.Special thanks to Paul Brickell at the London Legacy Development Corporation for his long-standing support of this project, through all its ups and downs, and to Peter Tudor and Layla Conway who also supported this project at decisive moments. Clare Melhuish, director of the UCL Urban Lab provided support for the two local community workshops and gave us much encouragement along the way.

This map, guide and resources would not be possible without support and funding from Heritage Lottery, which has stuck with the project through some extraordinarily difficult circumstances. We are also very grateful to the Foundation for Future London and the Raphael Samuel History Centre for their funding and support for various aspects of the project.

Augmented Reality credits:

Production Company: Hyperactive Developments
Development Partner: Heritage 5G Ltd
Producer: Dr Atif Mohammed Ghani
Co-Producer: Jay Younes
Writers: Ralph Ward, Michael Owens, Dr Jim Clifford, Dr Atif Mohammed Ghani
Creative Director: Greg Shaw
3D Designer: Kantaphon Phumphungphut
Voice Artists: Renee Lemaguet, Ian Hurd, Michael Owens, Josephine Margaret, Cheryl Hudson, Margaret Hayes, Ralph Ward, Atif Ghani
AR Archives: London Metropolitan Archives, Museum of London, Newham Community Archives, Hackney Archives, Mike Seaborne, Daily Mail Archive, London Legacy Development Corporation, Canadian Architecture Association
Partnerships include: Foundation for Future London