Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
13
The centrepiece of the park is the
Olympic Stadium
, surrounded on three sides by the
River Lee and the City Mill River; it seated eighty thousand for the Olympics, but the
stadium is set to become home to West Ham United football club in 2015, with a
reduced capacity of 56,000, but with retractable seating so it can still host athletics
events, as well as live music. Standing close to the stadium, with a bird's-eye view of
the whole site from its public observation deck, is the
Orbit
tower, a 377ft-high
continuous loop of red recycled steel designed by Anish Kapoor, looking like a giant
helter skelter (re-opening spring 2014). The most eye-catching Olympic venue is Zaha
Hadid's wave-like
Aquatics Centre
, to the east, which cost four times its original
estimate, and is expensive to maintain, but at least looks good. The other truly sexy
building is the curvy
Velodrome
, with its banked, Siberian pine track and adjacent
BMX circuit. At the western edge of the park, the
Copper Box
(used for handball
during the Olympics) is now a multi-sports centre and events venue. Overlooking the
whole site, the
Olympic Village
- now renamed East Village - at the eastern edge of
the park, originally housed seventeen thousand athletes during the Games, and is now
being converted into 2800 new homes.
Three Mills Island
A short walk south of the Olympic Park, along the River Lee, you can visit the
eighteenth-century architectural ensemble of
Three Mills Island
, an artificial island in
the Lee. Despite its name, there are now only two mills remaining, the most distinctive
of which is the
Clock Mill
, with its conical oasts - kilns used to dry grain - and its
pretty white clock tower.
House Mill
Three Mill Lane • May-Oct Sun 11am-4pm; March, April & Dec first Sun of month • £3 •
T
020 8980 4626,
W
housemill.org.uk •
!
Bromley-by-Bow
Opposite the Clock Mill stands the Dutch-style
House Mill
,
built in 1776, around
which you can take a guided tour, which explains the milling process and shows you
the surviving mill wheels which were driven by the tide. Beyond the mills are later
gin-distillery buildings, now converted into television and film studios. There's a café
in the Miller's House (open when the House Mill is open and on weekdays).
Abbey Mills
Visible to the northeast of Three Mills Island is the modern
Abbey Mills Pumping
Station
, sporting a gleaming metal pitched roof, and, adjacent, its much more famous
Victorian predecessor, a glorious Gothic-Italianate edifice nicknamed the “Cathedral of
Sewage”. The latter was built in the 1860s by Joseph Bazalgette and Edwin Cooper,
and was originally flanked by two twin chimneys decorated in Moorish style, which
were sadly demolished during World War II. Visible to the southeast of Three Mills are
seven ornate, wrought-iron
Victorian gasholders
, built on the site of a rocket factory set
up in the 1820s by William Congreve.
