Where do you put a stadium when the flame goes out? In East London, the answer has been years in the making — and it's still being written.
When London won the Olympic bid in 2005, the real prize wasn't the Games themselves. It was the question that followed: what happens next to 560 acres of contaminated, neglected land in one of the most underserved corners of the capital?
The answer, slowly and then all at once, has become one of the most ambitious urban transformations in modern British history.
In this episode, Georgina Godwin speaks with Shazia Hussain, CEO of the London Legacy Development Corporation, about what it truly means to build an inclusive innovation district from scratch – and why the hardest part isn't the architecture. From the days when the East Bank waterfront was stacked high with dumped fridges to its current incarnation as the home of the V&A, Sadler's Wells, the BBC, UCL and University of the Arts London, Hussain traces the full arc of a project that has survived three mayors, countless competing interests, and the perpetual tension between world-class ambition and community need.
She talks candidly about the living wage zone, the health innovation agenda, the drive to make these grand institutions genuinely porous to local people — and why the ten-year-olds of today are the real measure of whether any of it has worked. This is a conversation about growth done differently: not extracted from a community, but built with it.
Visionary is brought to you by Here East, London's home of innovation and creativity.
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