Olympian heights

“It’s a major disaster, a huge project that’s sweeping away a whole known landscape…” Ever since the news that the 2012 Olympic Games would redevelop London’s eastern borders, the novelist and filmmaker Iain Sinclair has been one of the scheme’s most vocal opponents. Mourning the death of the old habitats of Hackney Wick and the Lea Valley, he railed against the conspiracy of developers and government “to reconstruct London to their mutual advantage. Dr Frankenstein with a Google Earth program and a remote-control laser scalpel…” he called the project in an essay for the London Review of Books in June 2008.

Three years later, though, the Olympic site is moving inexorably towards completion. The Stadium, the Velodrome and Zaha Hadid’s Aquatics Centre (at £268m almost three times its original estimated budget of £75m) are clearly identifiable, while the promise of life beyond the three weeks of the Games is evident in the residential tower blocks of the Olympic Village, the Eurostar terminal and the huge Westfield Stratford City shopping centre.

Google Earth was one of Giles Price’s inspirations when he decided to tackle the Olympic site. Photographers have been documenting it with increasing difficulty over the past four years, dodging security guards and trying to find a decent vantage point over the flat plain. Price felt that there was little new he could do on the ground, so he took the aerial route, hiring one of the limited number of twin-engined helicopters allowed to fly over London (two engines are mandatory, so there’s a back-up if one fails) and rigging up one of the latest generation of digital medium-format cameras that deliver images in tremendous detail. “I wanted to experiment with this new technology, but I also wanted to find something that works on a human level,” he says – a marriage that is admirably demonstrated in his own precarious operating position in the helicopter’s open doorway.

He began photographing in March this year and plans to continue at intervals until the sky over the Olympic zone is closed on July 1 2012. “This is the biggest urban development in London since Hyde Park, but one of the problems with trying to photograph it from the ground is it’s very, very flat, and you can’t see London around it – it’s as if it sits in its own world. But from the air you can make more sense of it. You can see how it connects to the rest of the city.” That said, Price’s photographs make the most of the site’s abstract qualities, simplifying the geometry of the architecture and the transport links and reducing the construction workers and their machinery to Tonka-toy proportions.

This is a new departure for Price, who usually concentrates on portraiture. But one aspect was familiar to him. In 1990, at the age of 16, he joined the Royal Marines and served in northern Iraq and Kurdistan during the first Gulf war. He left in 1994 to become a photographer, but by then he’d spent “a lot of time flying around in helicopters...” He is aware that, in spite of all the hoopla about the Games, for this part of London those three weeks in 2012 are just a staging post on the journey to a new urban future, from which there is no going back. “It’s the aspect of historical documentation that really interests me,” he says. “I mean, it will never look like this again.”

Olympian heights

An aerial view of the Olympic site showing the Olympic Village (left), the new Stratford International railway station (centre) and Westfield Stratford City shopping mall (right)

One of the many bridges that span the River Lea, linking the Olympic Stadium site with the surrounding area

The 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium is now complete

The ArcelorMittal Orbit, designed by the sculptor Anish Kapoor, will be Britain's largest piece of public art

The 400m BMX Track is due to be completed this summer. Price's images 'reduce the construction workers and their machinery to Tonka-toy proportions'

The Olympic Village will provide apartments for 17,000 athletes and officials

Construction is now complete on the Velodrome, the principal cycling venue, which will seat 6,000 spectators

Still under construction, 45 hectares of wildlife habitats will features regenerated waterways along with bird and bat boxes

The site will also feature a wetland area

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Exhibition details: Giles Price’s photography show ‘Macroscopic Olympiad’ will be at See Studio Exhibition Space, 13 Prince Edward Road, Hackney Wick, London E9, from May 19 to June 18 2011, www.seestudio.com.

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