White Elephant or West Ham?

Lord Coe can’t be too happy today. In his role as chair of the London Olympic Games Organising Committee, Coe – a key figure in winning the Games for the capital – has long insisted that the Olympic Stadium in East London should retain its athletics track in legacy use. But Coe’s vision, to drastically cut back the stadium from 80,000 to a modest 25,000 and make it a home of athletics in London, has long been the subject of fierce debate. Many argue that such a move would be a disaster, as without an anchor tenant and with limited demand for athletics as a spectator sport, the venue would become a white elephant.

Equally, critics say, it is a nonsense to build a world class venue only to then downscale it so severely. These critics say the Olympic organisers should follow the example of the Commonwealth Games in Manchester – where Manchester City took on the stadium - and have a football team become the anchor tenant. This option has been explored. But Coe has continued to insist that the athletics track should remain, whoever the anchor tenant, meaning football clubs, who have no interest in stadiums with tracks separating the supporters from the pitch, lost interest.

But not now. This week West Ham’s new owners – life long Hammers fans – said they wanted the club to move to the stadium after the Games - so long as there is no athletics track and it can seat around 55,000 fans. Ministers, the Mayor of London, the host boroughs – and the taxpayer – ought to be jumping for joy. The opportunity to have one of London’s premier football teams, whose current stadium is only three miles down the road, as anchor tenant of a stadium which currently does not have one ought to be leapt at with open arms. The absence of a legacy tenant for the stadium is one great stadium sized hole in the current legacy plans and West Ham would fill it. 

Olympics minister Tessa Jowell has said the Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC), which has now taken charge of the legacy planning from the Boris Johnson’s economic development agency, will look at West Ham’s proposal. Even before West Ham’s renewed interest, Baroness Ford, OPLC chair, said she wanted to review plans for the stadium. Boris Johnson too has been occasionally outspoken in bemoaning the lack of a viable legacy use for the stadium and has said he favours a football club. These three key players – along with the host boroughs (Mayor of Newham Robin Wales, a Hammers fan, said West Ham was the “obvious” solution to the stadium problem) – should now do all they can to turn West Ham’s interest into a concrete commitment. That will of course cost money. Converting the stadium into a football venue and removing the track could cost around £150 million, the OPLC says. It will also require Coe - who did a grand job winning the Games for London - to be sidelined. Those with an interest in making the legacy a success must be allowed to give the West Ham option the attention it deserves.

NB: The author is an Arsenal supporter and therefore is in no way biased towards West Ham.

Loss of Olympic legacy chief a blow for east London

The news today that Tom Russell has parted ways with the London Development Agency’s London 2012 Olympic legacy team is cause for consternation. Russell has been a real champion for regeneration and achieved great success with the Commonwealth Games-led regeneration of East Manchester. Since starting out with the London Development Agency in January 2008 he has brought forward the legacy masterplan, fostered partnership working between the five host boroughs, and established a new urban regeneration company to take on the legacy plan. Many expected that he would remain involved, perhaps as chief executive of the URC, the same position he held in East Manchester.

But this morning the LDA has said his work is done. In an odd press release, they announced that Tom had decided to “pass the baton” to the URC, which takes over the legacy tomorrow. But it did not clearly state that he had resigned. Indeed when questioned an LDA spokeswoman would not say whether he had resigned or whether he had been dismissed, reiterating only that he was “passing the baton”, the phraseology of track and field, not employment law.

Russell has in the past questioned whether the main Olympic stadium should retain an athletics track after the games. That commitment on Lord Coe’s part – some say driven by his own desire to one day head up the International Olympic Committee – meant that legacy plans for the stadium have been hamstrung from day one because no “big ticket” user, as Russell put it, such as a football club, wants a stadium that has an athletics track separating the crowd from the action. Russell was right to raise this as an issue and the Mayor would have done well to heed his warning: more than likely without a major tenant the stadium will not be able to pay its own way. Certainly, track and field is unlikely to keep it going: athletics is not a major spectator sport in England and probably never will be.

Russell had great ambitions for Olympic Park. Since taking on the job, he has been clear that the International Broadcast Centre and the Main Press Centre – the IBC/MPC – which will house the press during the games, was the key Olympic legacy project. Earmarked as a media business hub after the games and potentially creating up to 10,000 jobs, Russell maintained that it was the media centre that would catalyse the regeneration of the area and make it the successful place he was hoping to create. Hence the vigorous behind the scenes negotiations between the LDA and the Olympic Delivery Authority, as budgetary constraints forced the ODA to scale down and cut back the quality of the IBC/MPC. It is unlikely that design watchdog Cabe's verdict on the media centre this week – that it showed a “paucity of imagination” and exhibited an “extraordinary banality” – pleased Russell.

No doubt the story of his exit will soon emerge. But for now its fair to say that with Russell’s departure the promise of a real regeneration legacy for East London has suffered another blow. Working within tough constraints, Tom Russell was one of the good guys.

London loads up on Sugar

Such is the public and media appeal of the London mayoral race that Boris has barely had the chance to oil the wheels on his commuter bicycle before the gossip begins about who may oppose him in 2012. The mayoral race that year holds a special prize for the winner: being mayor at the Olympic Games. 

Tonight's Evening Standard has a poll saying that if Sir Alan Sugar stood against Boris, he would beat the flaxen-haired Tory by 40 per cent to 32. The poll is slightly misleading, as it assumes that Sugar would stand as an independent – not beyond the realms of possibility – when an embryo proposal suggests he is being wooed as the Labour candidate. 

Still, party ID might not matter that much by 2012, and a Labour ID (as hard as it may seem today) may even help. London is usually a fairly Labour-friendly place, and by then David Cameron's Tories are likely to be in Number 10, and London often likes to vote against the incumbent national government. 

So let's assume the figures are robust and Sugar has a real chance of winning London, whether he stands as an independent or for Labour, of whom he is a supporter and a donor. Can he really win? My spidey-sense says Yes. 

Thanks to the hit TV show the Apprentice, he is a bigger name now than when he launched eighties supercomputer the Amstrad CPC464 (pictured). And Sugar has the right credentials – born the son of the tailor in Hackney, he is a man self made by hard graft. In the YouGov poll, working class voters favour Suralan over Boris by a large margin. And he's seen by the public as a no-nonsense figure who gets things done. I can see why he has public appeal. 

But would he be a good mayor? For what it's worth, I have my doubts. I suspect that, while I'm sure he has his mellower moments, Suralan is not too far from his TV persona. In short, he's a bully-boy. It's hard to run City Hall by just bulldozing through, it requires collegiate working. I'm not sure Sugar has the time or the inclination for such niceties. But that doesn't mean he won't win. 

Boris Johnson has pleased many and offended few since arriving as mayor with his sunny disposition and cross-party appeal. But so far he has lacked any big vision or ideas. He will be afraid that Sugar may one day say to him: "Boris, you're fired."

Forget Tokyo: It's time to rid Oxford Circus of traffic

Oxford Street is set for a taste of Tokyo. Oxford Circus, the intersection between London's most famous shopping street and the elegant Regent Street, is to be reworked. Under the plans, traffic approaching the crossroads from all four directions will be halted simultaneously at red lights, allowing pedestrians to cross diagonally as well as straight ahead en masse. The scheme, modelled on the Shibuya crossing in the Japanese capital, will also see much of the ugly street clutter and barriers that blight Oxford Circus removed.

That may help, but it won't help enough. Inexplicably – certainly to Londoners, many of whom try their best to avoid it – Oxford Circus is among the world's top destinations, getting 200 million visitors a year. For visitors from smaller countries, the concentration of so many big retail brands in a long, wide thoroughfare may command awe, briefly, but it doesn't take much more than a second glance to see that London's shopping heartland is something approaching a national disgrace. Londoners may know there are plenty of better areas to spend a Saturday shopping in the capital, many visitors don't.

Blessed with a grand boulevard and fine buildings, Oxford Street has managed to fashion a sow's ear from a silk purse. The pavements are way too narrow to accommodate the throng of confused tourists and exasperated locals that blend awkwardly in the area. Shabby transitory retailers pollute the Tottenham Court Road end of the street. There is clutter everywhere – poor signage, ugly street furniture and unlicensed advertisements for such delights as the never-ending golf sale. But the area's fundamental problem is its traffic.

In spite of being closed to general traffic, Oxford Street is plagued by motor vehicles. These are chiefly buses moving at a snail's pace in a noisy, smelly, grumbling thin red lines; plus a few cabs with frustrated drivers and the odd lost boy-racer in a sports car. The air quality and environment is unpleasant – even crossing the road can be an ordeal.

A few pilot traffic-free days run by the New West End Company have been hits with shoppers, so the question is, instead of messing about with Tokyo-style pedestrian crossings, why not abolish traffic in Oxford Street completely and open up the street to pedestrians? Some people will moan that they can no longer catch their bus from outside, say, John Lewis, but this is a price worth paying. A clever programme of re-routing would do the trick, and people would get used to it.

Many of the world's best shopping areas are pedestrianised – including many in London itself, such as Covent Garden. It seems ludicrous that its biggest draw is relegated to monumental embarrassment by the smoke and choke of jammed-up traffic.

The Baroness with the big job

All jobs are not created equal. The big appointments story of the week was that of Baroness Ford being hired as the boss of the Olympics legacy company, which is responsible for ensuring that east London continues to benefit from the 2012 Olympic Games long after the cheering has quietened. 

That's the biggest and hardest job in the entire Olympics portfolio. The cost overruns at Wembley and the fiasco of Pickett's Lock may suggest otherwise but, relative to creating a lasting legacy, it is easy to build a few facilities, especially when you have a powerful planning vehicle at your side in the shape of the Olympic Delivery Authority. Making good use of them after the games is a different matter. 

I've no doubt that, for example, the velodrome and pool will be enjoyed by Londoners. But the big ticket items pose a much bigger problem for Margaret Ford. The Olympics organisers have already made a strategic blunder by failing to find a viable long-term use for the main stadium. The solution was simple and worked well in Manchester after the Commonwealth Games – tear up the track and use the ground for a popular team sport.

West Ham United would have been an obvious tenant, although I was compelled by an eye-catching idea to turn the stadium into an MCG-style arena that could actually meet demand and keep prices down during major tournaments or tours such as when Australia come to town for the Ashes series.

As it is, Ford finds herself hamstrung by the insistence of an obsessive IOC that the stadium be used for athletics, a minority spectator sport in England, which commands tiny gates in comparison to our true loves of football, cricket and rugby. 

It doesn't end there. I shan't spoil the surprise, but Regeneration & Renewal has a story on Tuesday that another key element of the Olympics legacy is under threat. All in all it adds up to one daunting in-tray for the former English Partnerships chair.

There is one positive though: Ford herself. The Scot is known for her ability to get things done and keep a cool head and genial manner. London could really benefit from the games, but some of the poor early decisions may have to be unpicked for it to do so. Should she deem that necessary, I'd warn anyone against getting in her way. 

Happy Easter. 

Ken, you're fired

A report in today’s Evening Standard says that the Labour Party is lining up Sir Alan Sugar as its candidate for London mayor. Whether Sugar would have a better shot against Boris Johnson than Ken Livingstone – who also wants to run for mayor as a Labour candidate in 2012 – is questionable. Despite losing against Johnson, Livingstone got more than one million votes in the 2008 mayoral election, receiving a much greater share of the vote than the Labour Party in the London Assembly elections and local elections on the same day.

But what might a Sir Alan Sugar mayoralty mean for regeneration in the capital?

Sir Alan has been a big backer of apprenticeships, so expect London Development Agency funding to be channelled into helping young people learn trades.

He has also demanded investment from the Government to put thousands more police on the streets. "It has gone bloody mad out there. It really is Broken Britain. Something needs to be done and it has got to be radical,” he told the Sun last year. The London mayor chairs the Metropolitan Police, so a Sugar mayoralty could see zero-tolerance policing.

As chairman of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, Sugar brought in glamorous overseas players, including Ilie Dumitrescu, Gica Popescu and Jurgen Klinsmann, so we could see some interesting faces in Sugar’s adminstration.

But his top team may have a high turnover. On The Apprentice, Sugar fires a candidate every week. And at Spurs, he sacked popular boss Terry Venables, later saying: “I felt as though I’d killed Bambi.”

Skyline rivalry

We've just heard that the construction contract has been signed for the Shard - an 80-storey beast of a skyscraper that would replace the Southwark Tower near London Bridge station just across the water from the City.

The promoters are keen to point out that the building would feature the highest home in the UK. But before it is even built, it already has a potential rival, a so-far unnamed tower designed by Herzog & de Meuron that press leaks suggest will have a penthouse 900 feet in the air that boasts views of the English Channel. Not bad - after all people who claim they live in London and have a seaside view are usually residents of Brighton who are talking to Americans.

This cheeky one-upmanship from the construction industry is encouraging in a recession. It can only help London come out of this slump consolidating the position it had jockeyed for when we went into it: as the capital of the world. Some in New York would dispute that of course, but even many across the Atlantic concede London looks better value for the title.