The London Olympic legacy

✨ Watch on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Where fridges once piled as high as buildings, Sadler's Wells now stands. That detail alone tells you everything about what has happened to East London since 2012.

Shazia Hussain has spent twenty-five years watching this corner of the capital transform — first as a young woman standing on contaminated brownfield land, imagining what might one day be possible, and now as CEO of the London Legacy Development Corporation, the body charged with making that possibility permanent. She is, in the most literal sense, someone who has lived the whole arc of the story.

The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park she oversees today is a long way from the post-industrial dumping ground it once was, and an even longer way from the temporary spectacular it became for a few luminous weeks in 2012. What it is now is harder to categorise, and that, Hussain suggests, is rather the point. Eight universities. Twenty million visitors a year. A cultural quarter — East Bank — that lines the waterways with Sadler's Wells, BBC music studios, University of the Arts London, the V&A East and UCL. Economic growth running at nearly three times the London average. A return of over three billion pounds a year on a nine billion pound investment. And 1.2 million people living across the four surrounding boroughs — Tower Hamlets, Newham, Hackney, Waltham Forest — who need to feel that all of this is genuinely for them.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How the Olympic legacy became something far more ambitious than anyone originally planned — evolving from a master-planning exercise into a fully integrated innovation district with world-class cultural, academic and commercial institutions at its heart.

• Why inclusive growth is the defining challenge — and opportunity — of the park's next phase — and how tools like the London Living Wage zone, publicly porous buildings and borough-wide partnerships are being used to ensure that prosperity reaches the communities that surround it.

• What a genuinely successful urban legacy actually looks like — and why the real measure of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park will not be found in economic statistics, but in the lives of the young people growing up in its shadow today.

Watch the episode on YouTube below, or listen via your preferred podcast app.