The glistening splendour of the London 2012 Olympic Park, with its stunning, state-of-the-art venues and sustainably landscaped water gardens, is a far cry from the derelict industrial wilderness it was just five years ago.
From gasworks to games
Originally a marshland in the east of London, the site started to be filled in the 19th century – but later became a general rubble and rubbish dump. Factories came and went for making cigarettes, chemicals, fertilisers, paints and glues, along with associated railways, gasworks and electrical substations.
Securing the site
Creating a safe, stable development platform for the 200 hectare Olympic Park was therefore a massive civil engineering challenge. A paper on this by Ian Mead, James Apted and Saphina Sharif of Atkins has been accepted for publication in the ICE Geotechnical Engineering journal and will be available online shortly.
On-site ‘soil hospitals’
The UK Olympic Delivery Authority’s £400 million enabling works project involved excavating over 2 million m³ of soil and, where needed, treating it and re-using it on site. Mead tells us that an earthmoving job of this size ‘is a significant operation in its own right’, but it was complicated further by the site’s history and contamination of a ‘significant portion of the soil and groundwater’.
Arsenic, lead, zinc, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, chlorinated solvents and ammonia were removed from 900 000 m³ of ground in on-site ‘soil hospitals’ before being re-used, leaving a healthy, sustainable site for the games and legacy uses.
Find out more about cleaning up the park
For more information please contact the ICE Proceedings editor Simon Fullalove on +44 (0)20 7665 2448, or email editor@ice.org.uk