London 2012: From Waste Land To Gold Rush 

London 2012: From Waste Land to Gold Rush

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Archive on 4: London 2012: From Waste Land to Gold Rush

BBC Radio 4 - Archive on 4, London 2012: From Waste Land to Gold Rush

The extraordinary story of how London came to host the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Gabby Logan presents the extraordinary story of how London came to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012 with guest Sir Chris Hoy and featuring archive and new interviews.

Ten years ago, for a few short August weeks, London and Britain was the cultural and sporting capital of the world. Gabby Logan tells the extraordinary story of how London became host city for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and politicians, planners, architects and builders transformed a neglected chunk of east London into a superb Olympic Park.

Gabby interviews Jessica Ennis Hill and Nicola Adams on sharing the country's joy and the triumphs of their own experiences, revisiting and providing fresh insights into some of the most memorable moments of London 2012, as athletes from Team GB won a shed-load of medals. Sir Chris Hoy returns to the finishing line in the velodrome where he won his sixth gold. 

The programme offers fascinating observations on the physical and political build up to the Games - the unlikely alliances of extraordinary characters, political rivals, visionary planners and exotic architects that enabled the Games bid to go ahead and the Park to get built. All this as London mayors and prime ministers came and went, with all the investment made in the shadow of the great 2008 financial crisis.

Gabby also looks at the legacy of the Games - has grassroots sport been boosted, or have those legacy hopes been disappointed?

Finally, the programme explores what enabled Britain, thought by some to be famously bad at delivering big national projects, to make such a huge success of London 2012.

Presenter: Gabby Logan
Writer: Dave Hill
Executive Editor: Michael Foster
Producer: Andrew McGibbon

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