After being announced as the hosts of the 2012 Olympic Games, The British Olympic committee chose Stratford as the location for the Olympic Park. The park was designed by a consortium of the very best designers and engineers, resulting in a park with an eclectic mix of contrasting architecture styles and infrastructure. Due to this, the park required a lighting strategy that welded all of the different elements together, in true Olympic unity.

Sutton Vane Associates wrote the entire strategy for the park in just ten weeks. It included lighting for individual buildings, structures, areas, roads, paths and cycle routes. Having been dubbed ‘the greenest games ever, the project was a major sustainable lighting project in the UK.

Meticulous attention was paid to every single detail of the project, to ensure that it was as environmentally friendly as possible. Discussions were held about small details like how much-recycled aluminium would be used to create a lamppost. Even the carbon footprint of not only individual fittings themselves but all the way down to the individual components of the fittings were investigated, a process that was way ahead of its time. SVA also utilised the latest renewable technologies such as wind turbines, solar panels and LED lighting, a relatively new and unknown technology at the time.

“…We are talking about 2008 and I had to make the scariest decision of my life, which was do we use the tried and trusted, good energy-saving technologies like fluorescent and metal halide and that kind of thing? Or do we take a real gamble and use this frightening new thing called LEDs that we don’t know much about? …. We decided that we would light the Olympics as much as possible with LEDs and history was on my side” says Mark Sutton Vane when asked about the use of LEDs in the park.

Arguably the most iconic part of the lighting scheme is the Memory Masts, 31m high lamp posts unlike any other. The Memory Masts, which light the concourse around the main stadium, were designed to be as simple as possible. Their impressive height meant that far fewer fittings were needed, meaning that the concourse and the view across the park remained as unobstructed as possible. The Memory Masts have since become part of the visual look and memory of the games. They stand as a reminder to the world that this was the greenest Olympics ever.

Due to the very nature of the Olympics being viewed all around the world at all times, the park had to look as impressive and vibrant during the night as it did during the day. The memory masts helped with this; the dynamism created by the vertical wind turbines on top of the masts gave energy to the park even when empty, both metaphorically and physically. Other lamp posts were also designed with renewable energy in mind; highly adaptable lamp posts with solar panels on top were used.

The lighting design didn’t end when the games closed, lighting designs were also created for the transition from the Olympics to the Paralympics, then for the Paralympics themselves, next the transition from the Paralympics to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and finally the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park as it is today.

Sutton Vane Associates won multiple awards for their work at the Olympic Park and Mark Sutton Vane holds the 2012 Learning Legacy Ambassador for the lighting design work on this unique project.