Latest news with #QueenElizabethOlympicPark
Times
3 days ago
- Sport
- Times
Anger at plan to convert Olympic Park tennis courts to padel
Indoor courts at the Olympic tennis centre are set to be replaced by padel courts, prompting a backlash from 'extremely livid' local residents and wheelchair tennis players. The Lee Valley Hockey and Tennis Centre informed members by email on Tuesday that it was converting its indoor hall of four tennis courts into seven double and two single padel courts to 'grow participation across all ages'. The email said that the centre was planning for work to begin this summer and finish by the autumn, with scheduled courses moved to its six remaining outdoor courts. However, within two days 650 locals had signed a petition calling for a reversal of the decision, which has been labelled 'disappointing' by the Lawn Tennis Association less than a week before Wimbledon. The petition was started by James Labous, a father of two from Walthamstow, east London, who has been playing tennis there for ten years. 'Indoor courts are actually vital for the tennis infrastructure in this country, considering our climate,' he said. • How padel fever is making a racket all over Ireland 'There aren't enough indoor courts in the country and that's probably why the sport isn't played all year round and partly why we're not developing the players we should be. This facility is a jewel and it's going to be lost.' The centre in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park was purpose-built for the 2012 Paralympics — the Olympic tennis was hosted at the All England Lawn Tennis Club in Wimbledon — and opened to the public in 2014 after a £30 million renovation. The indoor courts, Labous said, are rarely available to book on weekday evenings due to their popularity, with sessions for university groups and some 'really promising juniors'. He said regular players at the centre were 'all extremely livid'. 'It's an Olympic legacy site, it's state-of-the-art, it's a wheelchair-accessible centre,' he said, 'There was no consultation with the users of the centre. They're clearly trying to push this through really quickly.' Labous described the pay-as-you-go courts as inclusive, unlike several 'stuffy tennis clubs' in the country, adding that the year-round coaching was good value. He questioned why the centre could not redevelop other spaces, such as one of two car parks. Manoj Soma, the founder of Choice International UK, a disability equality charity, has been coaching and managing wheelchair tennis sessions at Lee Valley every Sunday for almost five years. 'I was extremely disappointed, because this was one of the only fully accessible, disabled-friendly venues in east London,' he said of the decision. Although he welcomed the opportunity for disabled people to try padel, he said: 'Wheelchair tennis is one of the paralympic sports — not padel as far as I am aware.' Soma said he had not been consulted about the change. He questioned why the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority (LVRPA), which owns the centre, had not proposed converting only some of the indoor courts or even creating outdoor padel spaces. • Andy Murray to get a statue at Wimbledon The LVRPA, a public authority part-funded by a council tax levy, did not hold a public consultation before announcing the plans, which will cost £490,347. Shaun Dawson, chief executive of the LVRPA, said that the Better leisure centre group, which operates the facility, had originally come to him with a proposal for padel courts. He said the LVRPA had rejected an earlier 'hybrid' proposal to retain some of the indoor tennis courts due to volume levels of padel alongside tennis. He said that they did not consider building a new structure on the site as it was designated Metropolitan Open Land, making planning approval more difficult. 'We want to make it far busier, more inclusive, more accessible in terms of different sports, and clearly there's a bottom-line dimension to that as well: more footfall makes the venue more viable and sustainable in the long term,' Dawson said. There will be nine padel courts, which he said would be available to rent for a 'similar price' to the four current courts, which were recently increased to £30 an hour. 'This isn't about running down tennis, it's about diversifying the offer,' he added. 'Padel is exploding in popularity. It's a smaller racket, it's just an easier game to play for more people. 'The Olympic legacy evolves, it doesn't stand still. We need to respond to trends and that's what we're doing.' A Lawn Tennis Association spokesman said: 'These plans are particularly disappointing as the LTA and Tennis Foundation invested half a million pounds in the original tennis facility and we understand the indoor tennis courts are heavily used. 'The data cited by LVRPA on tennis participation is incorrect. We will be engaging with the LVRPA and the operator GLL [Better] to encourage them to consider other options that can see both tennis and padel played on site.'
Telegraph
4 days ago
- Sport
- Telegraph
London 2012 tennis courts ripped up for padel
Tennis courts built for the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics are to be ripped up and replaced by padel courts in a move branded an 'absolute betrayal' of the Games' legacy. Telegraph Sport can reveal that the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park's Lee Valley Hockey & Tennis Centre will spend almost £500,000 – part-funded by the taxpayer – converting its four indoor tennis courts this summer into seven double and two single padel courts. The plans have emerged almost 13 years since the venue hosted the wheelchair tennis at the 2012 Paralympic Games, just over 11 since it opened to the public following a £30 million revamp, and days before the start of Wimbledon. The change, which will force thousands of tennis players onto the site's six outdoor courts all year round or to find alternative indoor courts elsewhere, was given the go ahead last week by the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority (LVRPA) with no public consultation. A petition was launched on Tuesday by users of the centre calling for LVRPA, a public authority part-funded by a Council Tax levy, to 'reverse' its decision. Among those to sign it was Olympic Park resident Sinjon Vedi, 48, who told Telegraph Sport the plans were an 'absolute betrayal' of the London 2012 legacy and Sir Andy Murray's 2013 Wimbledon triumph. Vedi, who said he played at the venue 'four or five times a week' and that his daughter was also a regular there, added: 'This is a betrayal of everything that happened during the Olympics. Padel isn't an Olympic sport. 'To demolish some of the most beautiful courts that were built in honour of the Olympics, and as part of Andy Murray's legacy, all of that has been thrown away.' He also said coaches who worked at the venue had been left 'heartbroken' and 'wondering what happens to them now', adding: 'Without the coaches, without the indoor courts, I do genuinely think I can see the tennis there completely disappearing.' A proposal for two of the venue's outdoor courts to be converted for padel was rejected in February by the publicly funded LVRPA because of concerns over 'the balance of available capital against projected income'. That was despite the plan having been approved by Greenwich Leisure Ltd, the charitable social enterprise that operates the venue under its 'Better' brand. LVRPA chief executive Shaun Dawson also told Telegraph Sport a 'hybrid' option that would have seen some indoor tennis courts retained was similarly rejected because padel is a 'very loud' sport unsuitable to take place alongside tennis. Denying the approved plans represented a betrayal of the London 2012 legacy, he said: 'Legacy doesn't stand still. Legacy has to evolve; otherwise it becomes a white elephant.' Dawson said LVRPA was aiming to 'double the footfall, double the levels of participation' at the venue by introducing a sport he proclaimed to be 'far more inclusive' than tennis, adding: 'Outside of Wimbledon, there are tennis courts across the land that are empty.' He was also confident the £490,347 cost, around 30 per cent of which he said would come from the taxpayer, would be recouped within a few years. A report to the LVRPA's executive committee last week described padel as 'the fastest growing sport in the world with participation more than tripling in recent years' and stated the Lawn Tennis Association itself had committed to doubling the number of courts in the UK from 500 to 1,000. It also said of tennis: 'Nationally the demand for tennis is declining – according to figures produced by APS (Active People Survey, Sport England), in 2008/9 there were one million people who played tennis monthly and 530,000 who played weekly. In 2024 the numbers had dropped to 694,000 and 384,000 respectively. Participation is down by nine per cent in the 16-25 age group, compared with a five per cent decline across all ages.' The report acknowledged the conversion of the indoor tennis courts could have 'a negative impact on the venue's tennis coaches who deliver private tennis lessons'. It added: 'However, there is an opportunity for the coaches to become qualified padel coaches and increase their income by working on the venue's padel course programme and providing their own private lessons.' The report said there were two 'major' padel developments in nearby boroughs of Stratford and Ilford, 'which are showing rapid growth'. It added: 'The Stratford development is built on land earmarked for development and so will be displaced in 2026.'
BBC News
04-06-2025
- General
- BBC News
New flora and fauna at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
A variety of flora and fauna are thriving in east London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, where more species of bee, bird, wasp and lichen have been the 2012 Olympic Games, the Stratford site was mostly industrial wasteland with contaminated soil, polluted waterways and extensive fly-tipped latest discoveries were made in a recent "bio-blitz", an intensive biological survey with experts from the London Natural History Society, UCL and Hackney Tom Bellamy said: "I have been really surprised at the biodiversity that's been achieved here in such a short time – especially considering how polluted a lot of the ground here was before the London 2012 Games." The survey identified three species of bee now in the park: the coastal leafcutter, sickle-jawed blood bee and the large sharp-tailed bee. It also recorded a species of hyper-parasitic wasp and a species of cuckoo wasp, 23 species of butterfly, 42 bird species, as well as 23 species of eels, kestrels, house martins, sand martins, the nationally scarce black mining bee and large scabious mining bee, and the soft-winged flower beetle - a threatened species across Europe - were all found in East Village, the site of the Athletes' Village during the 2012 Games. Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park ecologist Mr Bellamy said: "We have kingfishers, otters, eels and it's incredible that nationally scarce species of bees have been found here."Part of my job is to establish breeding populations for a wide variety of select species that we want to breed on the park. "I'm proud of what's been achieved so far but there is always more we can do."
The Guardian
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on a new era for museums: letting the public take control
The museum of the future has arrived and it looks like an Amazon warehouse. But art critics have unanimously awarded it five stars. From Saturday, visitors to the V&A East Storehouse in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park will be able to wander among the 250,000 objects in the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection that are not on display in its west London home. The headline-grabbing order-an-object initiative means you can book online to get your hands (gloves are provided) on a priceless artefact any day you like. And all for free. It is a triumph born out of necessity. After the V&A's eviction from their Kensington storage home a decade ago, they decided that instead of hiding one of the world's largest design collections in an expensive warehouse, they would turn it into an attraction in its own right. Storage is a big issue for institutions: only 1% of the British Museum's more than 8m artefacts are on public display. Showing off your overflowing attic makes the most of what you've already got, repurposing a closet that, for the V&A, includes a Balenciaga gown (the most requested item so far) and PJ Harvey's hotpants. Open-access storage is not a new idea. In 2021, the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam became the first purpose-built (and presumably the only Ikea-salad bowl-inspired) public art-storage destination. The V&A Storehouse takes a leap further. You are invited behind the scenes of the museum, where everything is jumbled together and conservators are at work – a giant version of the BBC's The Repair Shop. Like the children who run away to New York's Metropolitan Museum for a week in EL Konigsburg's classic 1967 novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler, visitors are able to explore freely. 'We wanted people to feel like they're trespassing,' said Tim Reeve, the deputy director of the V&A. 'That feeling of joy, seeing behind the curtain.' Part of the V&A's mission was to inspire innovation, to be a bit radical. Ordering an object is a user-friendly way of engaging newcomers, not just a click-and-collect for art lovers. Like Sadler's Wells, which also launched a Stratford venue earlier this year, the V&A hopes to draw in a younger audience who may have felt excluded from its stately South Kensington home. A sister V&A East Museum will open close to the Storehouse next year. Putting everything on show cannot get over uncomfortable questions about the provenance of a museum's acquisitions. But it does give transparency to how the museum works and what – down to every last pin – it has got. This week, Manchester Museum won the European museum of the year award for its own approach to opening up the curatorial process. As part of its revamp in 2023, the museum handed its new South Asia gallery to a collective of 30 people from Manchester's diaspora communities to design and fill as they chose. The top floor has been given over to a college for neurodivergent students, with a London campus opening at the Design Museum in September. The pandemic, as well as funding and sponsorship crises and anxieties over legacy, have put institutions under pressure. Both the V&A East Storehouse and Manchester Museum show bold new ways forward. They mark a shift in how museums perceive their role. They remind us that these collections are our collections. Fill your basket.
The Guardian
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Look east: an exhilarating weekend in London's new cultural quarter
There's a collective intake of breath as the curator slowly unzips the white garment bag to reveal the treasure within: a white military-style jacket embellished with gold buttons and epaulettes, worn by Elton John on his 1981 World tour. To my left, laid out on a table, are a gold Versace bag and a pair of daintily embroidered blue silk shoes dating from the 1720s. To my right, a Vivienne Westwood corset and a Balenciaga pink taffeta evening dress from the 1950s. It's a fashion lover's fever dream and it's all here, at my fingertips. I'm at the V&A Storehouse in east London, a radical new museum experience that allows anyone to order up any item from the V&A's vast collection – for free – and to examine it at close quarters. Housed in the former Olympics Media Centre, on the edge of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, this lofty warehouse space gives unprecedented access to more than 250,000 objects, from an 11m wide stage cloth designed by Picasso to a cross-section of a maisonette from the Robin Hood Gardens council estate in Poplar. Gone are the glass cases, white walls and carefully curated exhibits of a traditional museum space. Instead, visitors are invited to look behind the scenes of a working museum, to wander among open shelves stacked high with deliriously eclectic objects and to peer into the workshops where conservators are at work. The effect is part Ikea store, part Victorian cabinet of curiosities. It's bonkers, exhilarating and I love it. The opening of this new V&A outpost marks the latest chapter in the reinvention of the Olympic Park as a 'new cultural quarter' for London. At the time of the London 2012 games, I lived in Bow, on the edge of the Olympic Park. On the night of the opening ceremony we watched from the window of my flat as fireworks lit up the sky above the stadium. It was the culmination of one of the most ambitious regeneration projects that London had ever seen and we had a ringside seat as this brave new world rose up from a 560-acre brownfield site. As well as providing a deprived area of east London with world-class sporting facilities, part of the Olympic legacy was the promise to build a new creative hub, somewhere that would inspire locals and visitors alike. We moved out of the area shortly after the games finished, so I was curious to see for myself whether that promise had been fulfilled. On a bright spring morning the park is quietly humming with activity. Teenagers glide along wide boulevards on roller skates and toddlers play in the water fountains in front of the London Stadium. On the canal, families drift by in pedalos in the shape of white swans, watched over by Zaha Hadid's imposing Aquatic Centre which carves a graceful arc in the blue sky. My daughter and I make a beeline for a cluster of new buildings which are lined up along the canal. The East Bank project represents the largest single investment in culture by a London mayor since the Great Exhibition of 1851. The first phase launched in 2023 with the opening of cutting-edge new campuses for University College London (UCL) and the London College of Fashion. Both sites have been designed to be open and accessible to the public. So you can wander into the reception of UCL East and see public art installations – on our visit Luke Jerram's 'Gaia', an inflatable replica of the Earth, was floating serenely above the atrium – or head to the cafe where your coffee will be delivered to you by a robot waiter. At the London College of Fashion, the public areas host regular showcases of student work. We stroll around the lobby, all bare concrete and curving staircases, and admire a display of outlandish undergraduate creations – although my daughter is even more transfixed by the cutting edge outfits the fashion students are wearing. Next door is Sadler's Wells East, a new outpost of the dance theatre which opened in February. The open-plan foyer is home to a light-filled bar, cafe and dance space – when we drop in for a coffee there's a community dance class in mid-flow. The 550-seat auditorium will provide a home for visiting dance companies of every genre, from ballet to hip-hop. We have booked tickets for that evening's show, a family-friendly performance of Snow White by the balletLorent. Our next stop is the ArcelorMittal Orbit, the twisted red steel sculpture that towers over the Olympic Park. We take the lift up to the viewing platform, a dizzying 80m above the ground. Far below us the London Stadium, now home to West Ham football club, is laid out like a Subbuteo pitch. As a general rule of thumb, I try to avoid any activity that involves having to don an Australian Rules Football helmet and elbow protectors. And yet here I am, joining the queue of teenagers waiting to launch themselves feet first down the Helix, the high-speed helter skelter that snakes around the outside of Anish Kapoor's look-at-me landmark. My teenage daughter takes one look at the foam helmet and refuses to go any further. 'It's just a big slide!' I tell her. 'Come on, it'll be fun!' These words – and others that cannot be published here – ring in my ears as I corkscrew down the metal tube at terrifying speed, emerging 40 seconds later feeling like I've been flushed down the S-bend. My sensible daughter has taken the lift down and is waiting for me at the bottom. 'Oh Mum,' she says. One of the side-effects of this area's transformation has been a burgeoning of the local food scene, from the world's first zero-waste restaurant, Silo in Hackney Wick, to Barge East, a floating bar and restaurant moored in the shadow of the London Stadium. We've booked a table at Hera, one of the park's newest openings, which has been winning accolades for its authentic Greek food. Sign up to The Traveller Get travel inspiration, featured trips and local tips for your next break, as well as the latest deals from Guardian Holidays after newsletter promotion It does not disappoint. From the basket of homemade bread and dip of smoked aubergine with thyme, honey and balsamic vinegar, to the elegant sea bass carpaccio and charcoal-grilled chicken skewers, everything is sensational. But the standout dish is the feta saganaki – feta cheese, wrapped in angel hair, deep-fried and drizzled with lemon honey. My daughter and I are still dreaming about it weeks later. It's the kind of lunch that needs to be followed by a long walk, so we trace the course of the canal, fringed with head-high whispering grasses, into the northern half of the park, eventually reaching the iconic Olympic rings – which have found a permanent home on a raised mound overlooking the Lee Valley VeloPark. A group of women dressed head to toe in sequins shimmer past in the late afternoon sunshine, on their way to Abba Voyage. The virtual concert experience has attracted more than two million visitors since opening in a purpose-built arena on the edge of the Olympic Park in 2022. In September, they will be joined by an army of David Bowie fans when the V&A Storehouse becomes the new home of the David Bowie archive, comprising stage costumes, song lyrics, instruments, makeup charts and sketches. And there's more to come. Next year will see the relocation of the BBC Music Studios from Maida Vale to Stratford and the opening of the V&A East museum in a striking new building inspired, apparently, by an X-ray of a Balenciaga dress. I've enjoyed being a tourist on my old home turf. It may not have the gravitas of South Kensington, the architectural cohesion of the South Bank Centre or the neoclassical elegance of Covent Garden, but East Bank is an invigorating and inspiring addition to London's cultural scene. And it's fun. Where else can you slide down Britain's tallest sculpture, handle vintage haute couture, or dance in front of an Abba avatar, all in one day? Information on visiting East Bank and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park:
