As I was getting on the bus for a tour of the London 2012 Olympic Park, the unmistakable 6'4" figure of John Armitt CBE, chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority, was getting off it. He had been showing some of the great and good around and was engaged in conversation with none other than Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber. Here, in London's East End, was the lord of the West End taking a good look at where, in two years time, bigger dramas than anything even he can conceive will be played out in front of the world.
The Olympic Park is not a building site. It is a 600-acre city within a city. The scale is staggering. The Press and Broadcast Centre is the size of Canary Wharf Tower laid on its side, the Olympic Village is 11 buildings each the size of a football pitch, 1.3 million tonnes of soil were cleaned of centuries of industrial contamination... the list could go on for this entire magazine, with a note at the end saying "continued next month".
John Armitt knows the numbers — all of them — and what is involved in a project of this size. In a career that has seen long service at construction giant John Laing and a stint as chief executive of Costain Group, Armitt was CEO of Union Railways, the company responsible for building the Channel Tunnel rail link, and spent six years as CEO of Railtrack and its successor Network Rail before taking on his current role in 2007. He spoke to business:life about the challenges of building a city from scratch.
The project involved the creation of a large company from a standing start. What were the challenges in that?
John Armitt In a sense it wasn't really from a standing start because there had been the period of the bid. So there was a kind of shadow Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) sitting in the background before we won the bid. Also, the nature of huge projects like this is that the people who do it are used to this sort of situation — starting from scratch. Years ago, after the Falklands War, I was involved in creating a joint venture which basically had to get on a boat and set sail for the Falklands, build a cabin and start from there. Here we have a project which, when the ODA came into existence, had a seven-year horizon — so we were able to offer people a job for a number of years. And people also thought of it as a once in a lifetime opportunity and they were prepared to leave good jobs to come to the ODA for that chance.
BL How many different contractors are on site?
JA Well, that very much depends on what level you take it to. Of the big contractors, there would be about 20, then below that you can multiply that by 100. McAlpine, for example, who are doing the main stadium, are a tier one contractor and they have at least 100 subcontractors themselves and some of those have subcontractors too, so you finish up with thousands. Of course many of these are smaller and are only on site for a matter of months before their work is done. There's a constant churn of people, which is why today we've got 10,000 people on the project but by the time we've finished 30,000 people will have come and gone. And they're from all over the UK. In percentage terms it's roughly 50 per cent from London and the Southeast and 50 per cent from the rest of the UK and beyond.
BL What are the main challenges of a build of this scale?
JA The big challenge is logistics. You've got an area roughly the size of Hyde Park and within that we've created a series of islands, which in a sense create a fence around the individual stadium areas, but then you've got to connect the whole lot together. So you need to install the infrastructure, but of course you're trying to run around the thing at the same time as you're trying to build that infrastructure.
We had to move 100 businesses off the site. Then we had all the existing buildings to demolish and we had to get rid of the power lines, removing 50 overhead pylons. Before we could remove those, we had to build two 6km long tunnels about 30m below the site to put the new power cables in. Then we had a relatively clear site, but it was heavily contaminated. And because we didn't want to clog up the local roads with lorries we decided to clean it on site. We managed to recover 90 per cent of the contaminated material at that point.
You then have the daily challenge of bringing 10,000 people into the site. And we control the delivery system. We're getting on for about 800 deliveries a day to the site. They can't all arrive at the same time, so we created two off-site logistics centres outside London and every» »lorry has to go there and be security checked, then we give them a time window when they can arrive on site to make their delivery.
BL The logistics are obviously about efficiency, but are they also about local impact?
JA Absolutely, because community relations are central to this whole project. We have a dedicated community relations team, a 24-hour hotline and there are meetings with community groups on a regular basis. We've connected to about 80 schools in the area, and have monitors set up around the site to check for dust and noise levels. It's really about keeping people informed and inviting them in to come and have a look. If all local people felt was that their streets were being bunged up with lorries and they couldn't get to work because we were not handling the movements of our people and materials, then relationships would break down pretty quickly.
BL About halfway through this whole process we fell victim to economic crisis and recession. How did that affect the project?
JA Well, I think this project has really helped the construction industry through the recession. The Olympic Village, for example, is providing opportunity for those companies who would normally be building flats in London. And from our point of view, pricewise, the recession has helped us to a degree.
BL Are the deadlines being met?
JA We're about 65 per cent complete now. A year ago we set ourselves a series of milestones that we wanted to achieve by July 2010 and we met them. We're now setting our last milestone targets and this time next year the site will be largely complete, a year before the Games begin. Then we can hand over to Lord Coe and his team and they can start installing what they call their overlay, the biggest example of which is all the networks of cable required by the broadcasters.
BL How do you think it will measure up against other Olympic sites such as Sydney, Barcelona and Beijing?
JA I think it will stand up extremely well. What we will hopefully have done is provided the basis for the creation of a new place in London, with the biggest new park in the UK created for over 100 years and 3,000 new homes. And alongside everything we're doing, Westfield has been creating its development, which is two million square feet of retail space. So if you roll forward two or three years from now, you'll have a living village with its own school, medical centre, state-of-the-art shopping centre, some of the best transport connections in London and the various sporting facilities such as the Velodrome and the Aquatic Centre. And, of course, the Stadium.•
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