Olympia gives London creative confidence

There’s more Stetsons than usual on the London Overground, as trains pull into Kensington Olympia on a warm summer evening.

The Zac Brown Band have flown in to play the British Airways ARC, and some fans are dressed up Country and Western style to welcome the boys from Atlanta. Up on the shoulders of Olympia’s exhibition halls, on a new rooftop street, Emberton Walk, there are cowboys and girls tucking into sashimi at Wolves restaurant and downing drinks at Bar Arriba in the run-up to the gig. House music wafts out across the new glass canopy and into the West London sky.

This might seem like a very 21st-century spectacle in its globalised Americanism, but it’s nothing compared to 1902 and 1903, when the showman Buffalo Bill really brought the Wild West to Olympia. His 14-week theatrical extravaganza featured horse-wrangling frontiersmen as well as Sioux, Mexican and Cossack riders. In those days, though, the crowds would preload at The Hand and Flower pub on Hammersmith Road.

The new Olympia officially opened in mid-June, and on evenings like this, you feel the spirit of its future as well as its past. Now that Heatherwick Studio’s masterplan has expanded the famous exhibition centre into an entire district for culture, it’s worth scrutinising that spirit, and what kind of ‘culture’ runs in its veins.

Olympia has never been like the museums of ‘Albertropolis’ nearby. The V&A and its siblings were the academic offspring of the Great Exhibition of 1851; Olympia was its entrepreneurial niece, a glass-topped People’s Palace where punters could let their hair down, as well as learning about the marvels of the world.

“When we look back at Olympia’s heritage, its expression of spectacle and creativity was super-aspirational,” says Eliot Postma, a Partner and Group Leader at Heatherwick Studio. Indeed, by the time Buffalo Bill rode into Kensington, the Victorian venue had already welcomed circuses, the first projected film for a paying audience, and a celebration of Venice that saw gondolas floating across the Great Hall.

A 20th-century timeline takes in The Ideal Home Show, boxing bouts, food fairs, Jimi Hendrix on stage and Vivienne Westwood catwalks. Being open to business blurred distinctions of high and low culture. “But in the last 40 years or so, it lost some of that lustre,” continues Postma. “It had some business creativity, with small and medium-sized enterprises coming together for conferences, but without that sense of drama.”

The designs for the new Olympia needed to revive its free-wheeling sense of fun. A joyful public realm was the studio’s abiding ambition.

The site had become impenetrable for anyone without a lanyard or exhibition ticket. With the addition of Emberton Walk and other rooftop routes, passersby can now wander up and through Olympia, stopping for a coffee or just looking at the views. Postma argues that this kind of casual engagement is how people build real relationships with places.

“The true success of Olympia is the public experience at its heart, not the live music venue, or the theatre that’s opening next year, or the restored exhibition halls,” continues Postma. “Success is that on a Thursday evening, that public realm, those rooftops bars and restaurants, are humming and someone thinks, ‘This is cool – I’ll come back here on Sunday with my grandma. We can have lunch and then go to the new theatre.’”

Creative districts can, of course, quite casually bubble up from the bottom, when artists and clubs take root in areas (think Shoreditch in London, Kreuzberg in Berlin, Bushwick in Brooklyn). Then the problem is how their character can completely change when prices rise and tenants change. The opposite approach might be Olympia: it has an enduring mix of creativity and entertainment baked into its business plan, as the yeast that will raise the whole pie, which includes two hotels and over 550,000 square feet of workspace.

In its new incarnation, Olympia also offers something different to Londoners than the planned creative quarters of the South Bank, Barbican, Bankside and new East Bank, which are all anchored by public arts institutions. Olympia, by contrast, is entirely privately funded. In a low-growth economy, with less public money to spend, it demonstrates how the private sector can also lead on public culture, with a market-minded mix that puts people’s pleasure first.

That mix at Olympia makes for a ‘dusk until dawn’ experience. You can imagine a visitor’s jam-packed day: waking up in one of the two hotels, before networking in an exhibition at the Great Hall, punctuated by lunch at the Pilar Hall and a meeting at the Olympia Central offices. After work, their drinks, dinner and dancing is all on site, before their head hits the pillow nearby.

As a destination, it’s an ultra-social, experience-led ecosystem. This serves a pressing public purpose, says Postma. “We are just crying out for places that people can come together in real life,” he says, “far more than ever before.”

Seen in this light, Olympia is an antidote to post-Covid social isolation: performance experiences that can’t be replicated online; wow-factor terraces at the Olympia Central workspaces, to attract workers back to the office; and of course, an exhibition and conference business that’s all about person-to-person mingling.

The design process began back in 2017, after years of austerity but before Covid hit and Ukraine was invaded. “It should be a source of absolute optimism for us that during these crises, when the cost of materials was going through the roof, this 14-acre, £1.3 billion investment continued in London,” says Postma. Yoo Capital were the developers, jointly with Deutsche Finance International, with equity from Bavarian institutional investors. It was a statement of confidence in the British capital, partly from German capital.

It’s estimated that Olympia itself, as a creative district, will inject more than £600 million of value, attracting 3.5 million visitors and employing over 7,000 people.

Britain’s creative industries have become used to reeling off these kinds of numbers to justify their impact. Their total Gross Value Added to the country’s economy was £124.6 billion, in the latest government figures – a contribution that has expanded twice as fast as the rest of the economy since 2010. What these impressive figures miss, however, is “the transformative power of culture in redefining how we imagine, design, and build public life”, in the words of academic Mariana Mazzucato in her recent paper The Public Value of Arts and Culture.

The creative industries do not only boost spending and jobs; they shape the identity, togetherness and confidence essential for a booming economy. “Cultural funding is frequently the first to be cut during austerity,” she writes, “precisely when society most needs a renewed sense of purpose and imagination.”

This applies hyper-locally as much as regionally and nationally. Just down the road from Olympia, the Earls Court regeneration project wants to carve its own creative character to complement its neighbour, including through rehearsal and production spaces. Developers know that homes and offices sell and rent when an area has a distinctly human feel, and that is something culture can bring like nothing else.

Behind the numbers, the policy documents and the place-making slogans, the meaning of any area comes down to the everyday feelings people have when they visit.

The people spending the most time at Olympia over the next few years will be the students at Wetherby Pembridge, the secondary school now adjacent to the Great Hall. Their feelings, you hope, will be of inspiration. They can draw encouragement for their own lives from the exhibitors, actors and musicians in the buildings nearby; maybe they will return with their own business, or band, one day.

Then there is another important question for someone a little bit older: “Would you go on a date here?” That’s often posed by Thomas Heatherwick, the studio’s design director, when he talks about public space. Great places help relationships blossom.

Up on Emberton Walk this weekend, when the Stetsons are back on their shelves, you will see dates in full flow, and hear laughter, music and the sounds of memories being made. “London has needed a dose of positivity, and Olympia delivers it,” says Postma.