Could DCMS anchor Stratford Olympics offices?

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There is a lot emerging at the moment about who controls what and what can be developed around and on the Olympics sites, and I will be writing a lot about this next week in Estates Gazette and on the blog. These are definitely interesting times.
One interesting snippet from a very well placed source that can be related now, however, is historic but still may have longer-term implications.
I revealed in EG back in November of 2008 that Transport for London was being lined up as a long-term occupier of Westfield's Stratford City for 250,000 sq ft of offices as part of proposals to locate much of the Olympics media centre to the site during the 2012 Games.

The ODA and government were reviewing the wisdom of building more than 1m sq ft of media space in Hackney and looking at other options.
Of course this did not happen and Hackney Wick has remained the location for the media centre.
What I did not know until this week was the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) was also at the time being asked to move out of its 2-4 Cockspur Street offices in Trafalgar into the Stratford site in a bid to persuade Westfield to build the offices in time to house journalists for the 2012 Games.
Apparently the DCMS was horrified by the idea and it all went away.
But still, the idea of the government's sports department being located next to the Olympics Park does make a deal of sense.

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This page contains a single entry by Paul Norman published on December 4, 2009 4:24 PM.

Who will take control of the Olympics land? was the previous entry in this blog.

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