Grounds Maintenance, Landscape Creation, Arboriculture, Sports Surfacing, Parks management, IOS Managing Safely Training, Ecology & Biodiversity, Grass cutting, Horticulture, Street Cleaning, Soft Landscaping, Hard Landscaping
idverde provides a wide range of green services, including grounds maintenance, landscape creation, and advice services, to both private and public sectors across the UK.
idverde had the honour to be featured in the The Pro Landscaper London Supplement 2022 – “Ten Years of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park” examining the legacy of this iconic parkland. Our team have done a great deal to make this shared urban space a haven for wildlife and for busy Londoners looking for a quiet spot to reconnect with nature. Great to see such an insightful article.
It has been ten years since the games were hosted at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEOP) and the park has achieved its desired legacy, but what could the next decade have in store?
First, let’s rewind to before £9bn was spent on bringing the Olympic Games to London. One of the most iconic structures in Stratford was ‘Fridge Mountain’, a 20ft-tall tower of white goods, sitting atop a 200-acre brownfield site. It was a “waste ground,” says Christopher James, contract manager at idverde, which maintains the majority of the QEOP. Christopher was on the site in early 2011 working for a different contractor before joining The Landscape Group (which won the initial bid and has since been acquired by idverde). He’s been involved in the park ever since; when it first started maintaining the park in 2013 throughout the ‘Transformation’ phase to when it took over the maintenance of the whole park from 1 April 2014, and to now when idverde is looking to re-tender, as the green service provider’s “flagship contract” contract comes to a close.
Ahead of the Games themselves in July 2012, the site was cleared, and 14 venues were created, as well as 20km of new roads, 13km of tunnels, 26 bridges and 80ha of parkland. Once the Paralympic Games – in which ParalympicsGB had celebrated reaching third on the medal table – had come to a close, an 18-month programme began to transform the 560-acre site. It was to become a green hub for East London, for both the existing residents and also for new residents, with plans for five new neighbourhoods in the area.
The more naturalistic north of the Park opened first, exactly one year after the Olympics first began on 27 July, and the more formal south of the park – which includes Piet Oudolf’s prairie-style Pleasure Gardens – opened the following year, in April 2014. “The Games were definitely important for the area, but the redevelopment and the park itself has been really good for the local economy and visitors and it’s put East London on the map,” says Christopher.
And it’s ongoing too. As with any park, the site is evolving. “Some of the planting regimes that you can see are changing because it had to be wonderful from July through to September in 2012, but obviously that then has to be changed over time for the longer term,” explains Neal Glucksmann-Smith, who volunteered to help with the Games in 2012, then led community-guided tours of the park, and is now customer services and volunteer duty manager. “There’s a legacy, and it’s a legacy that’s been maintained”
Find out more about the progress of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in the London Supplement 2022 issue of Pro Landscaper here or download the article below.
