Fascinating chat with Andrew Boff (pictured), the Tory Party's London Assembly Olympics spokesman, this afternoon.
As reported earlier here and on EGi News and in a great article on 24hourdash.com and an equally good piece by Dave Hill of The Guardian today, Boff has been providing a rare, critical voice recently about the Athletes Village.
He thinks the ODA is seriously missing a trick legacy-wise by building "soulless mixed-tenure courtyard developments" which fail to address London's biggest housing problem - too few houses for families with a garden and a door opening on to the street. He has no problem with the space in the apartments which he thinks is satisfactory but claims that social housing tenants and families are being "aggressively penalised".
In particular Boff says that families on waiting lists should not be "effectively forced to live" as high as the sixth floor in an apartment, particularly on an estate where there are solely owner-occupied blocks.
He has some interesting ideas about what can be done about it, which you can read about in Estates Gazette this week.
He also had some interesting things to say about the Legacy Masterplan Framework for the 10,000 or so homes proposed for the 500-acre Olympics Park post-Games.
Boff says that the Stratford City outline masterplan for the athletes village site drawn up years before London was selected to host the 2012 Games has been too rigidly adhered to and claims that confidentially leading architects have told him that they walked away from the project when they realised that the ODA was unwilling to be more flexible with the design than the 11 high-rise apartment courtyards proposed.
As such he claims it is urgently important that the new Olympic Legacy Vehicle is prepared to be more flexible this time around when focusing on the six village developments currently proposed. He says currenlty only one of these proposes some low-rise housing development for families.
He says Boris Johnson is listening to him but as yet remains supportive of the Athlete Village designs and the emerging Olympic Legacy Masterplan Framework.
Will be interesting to follow this one.
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