As Friday night’s extraordinary opening ceremony for the 30th Olympiad unfolded it drew a line beneath the first chapter of an equally extraordinary ten year journey for Hackney and east London. It also definitively opened the next.
In what seems like the blink of an eye, ten years of talking legacy alongside delivering the Games, ten years of meshing and morphing games with legacy and legacy with games has now switched to the reality and singularity of delivering legacy. Tessa Jowell, in her Progress article on Friday, fittingly described the legacy challenge before us. The answer to ‘how we set about harnessing this energy when the athletes are gone’ is straightforward and closer than we think.
It has evolved out of our policies of renewal, inclusion and partnership implemented when we were in government and draws on the consistency, strength and leadership of our progressive local government. It draws on our thoughts about organising within our communities; it also draws on a set of powerful Labour principles of collective contribution and empowerment, accessibility and affordability, and an emerging future agreement with the citizen. It has defined the future of partnership – collaboration.
The last 10 years have seen many changes in this part of London. The quality of life has risen under a Labour-led council, itself led by an elected Labour mayor, Jules Pipe. The Labour council has been directly responsible for profoundly improving the lives of quarter of a million people and providing the political stability that ensures this change is sustainable and inclusive.
It must be said that the Olympics have not in themselves been responsible for this local change – that is to be credited to local leadership and partnership. The Olympics have however, been a powerful catalyst that when introduced into this landscape have encouraged, inspired, unlocked, energised, created and realised. It has provided an extraordinary ‘meeting place’ where people, institutions and organisations from all corners of a community have come together to contribute, to join in, it has provided the space for relationships to form; relationships that are focused on aspiration, not despair. These are relationships which, through collaboration, enable change.
Such collaboration has reinvigorated that sense of personal worth and collective aspiration; from learning at school to learning a new skill, from finding a job to starting a business, from the renewal of spaces like Hackney Marshes to building a new urban railway.
Collaboration which saw people volunteer as Hackney Hosts or Youth Ambassadors, resulting in the strengthening of collective and personal pride and well being through participation in the arts, sport and local business and enterprise.
Collaboration has been at the centre of all that has happened; this is not partnership in the form we advocated some years ago, a contractual relationship. Collaboration is a more fluid, creative and adept relationship; it is outcome led and is not exclusive in its membership.
It does not require the transfer of capital or revenue or reputation as it is about sharing but not relinquishing; each contributing to achieve an end, it can regroup to achieve another outcome with a different set of contributions. This is not a pure cooperative model but embraces the cooperative ethos and places it into a 21st century cultural context. Government, local and national, has a profound role in enabling collaboration, underwriting rather than funding and using regulation as an enabler.
The most progressive collaborative relationship in east London has been realised through the arts. For the first time anywhere within the UK, the creative community from across east London have developed a collaboration, bringing the local, regional and national together that through the commissioning of artists and designers they have set about offering new perspectives on community life, provoking healthy debate and encouraging constructive change and social progress that directly contributes to inclusive economic growth.
I would like to think that we would have done this without the Olympics, but as Tessa said of the Games, ‘this is, at its heart, a progressive project that has transcended tribal politics. Its fuel is optimism, ambition and lasting legacy.’
This describes perfectly the world in which the arts thrive; the arts have shown us how we can harness the energy from the Games.
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Guy Nicholson is a councillor and cabinet member in Hackney and is a non executive director for CREATE and the Barbican Centre. He is also a regional council member for Arts Council England.
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