Critical Examination of the use of Greenwich Park during the Olympics

Greenwich park home to Greenwich meantime and the national maritime museum was chosen by the London organising committee for the Olympic and Paralympic games (LOCOG) as the venue to host the equestrian events during the 2012 games. This decision was not without its controversy as organisations such as friends of Greenwich Park held demonstrations and signed petitions in order to try and overturn the decisions to use Greenwich as an Olympic Venue (Marsh, 2011). This is a worthy space to be critically examined as not only does Rosner and Shropshire (2012), reiterate how the Olympic are current and a popular area of research, the commonwealth games are fast approaching it raises the question of how effective temporary venues are for mega events (Changzhi, 2012). The Greenwich site used at the games had to be completely constructed and deconstructed once in 2011 for the test event and again in 2012 for the actual games. Starkey (2012), estimated the cost of this one venue at £120 million resulting in wide spread questions to be answered over the supposed legacy that the games were meant to be leaving behind. At present the Olympics as a whole are a huge topic of debate seen through wide spread research currently being carried out. Therefore the research available to use is very current although important to remember that there is only limited research that has been published so far. The study which is looking to critically examine the space that is Greenwich Park will look into key themes the successfulness of using Greenwich as an Olympic site, whether or not this temporary venue created the desired legacy promoted throughout the games and finally the effectiveness of using temporary venues when hosting mega events. Greenwich Park located in south east London is a world heritage site, being 180 acres it is the largest Greenfield site south of the Thames (Barker, 1999). Pevsner (2012) outlines how being a world heritage site has huge significance to the fact it