From Upton Park to Olympic Park: What does West Ham’s move tell us about sport and regeneration?

Abstract

In 2016 West Ham United Football Club is due to relocate from their ground in Upton Park, where they have been for a hundred years, to the Olympic Stadium in Stratford. It is argued that the move will generate multiple regenerative benefits at local, regional and national levels. Newham Council, an authority with a reputation for civic entrepreneurialism, envisages a ‘win, win, win’, by keeping the club in the borough, bolstering the status of the Olympic Park and securing housing on the site of the old stadium. Similar goals are envisaged by the Mayor of London and central government, keen to ensure an ‘Olympic Legacy’. However, other voices question the financial, policy and social integrity of the move. The Olympics have consumed a considerable amount of public money, but the stadium is due to be transferred to a private company (West Ham United Football Club) via a complex and controversial financial transaction. Claims of regeneration are challenged by contested interpretations of ‘affordable’ housing and broader concerns about the removal of an important local institution from its traditional, culturally diverse working class neighbourhood to a corporate-dominated environment where collective memories and identity may be trammelled by commercial interests. This paper critically interrogates the orthodoxy of the sport-regeneration discourse and argues that important socio-geographic, cultural and policy issues are silenced and threatened by the commercially driven rhetoric of ‘legacy’.