Castles Made of SandHow London lost on Boris Johnson’s extravagant pet projects

FRED ROMERO

Before the 2012 Olympics, most Londoners would not have even known about the area, a forgotten wilderness of industrial detritus and overgrown canals, apart from those few who still worked there, and a community of artists who had installed themselves in warehouses around the periphery. But now, a visitor emerging from the vast warren of the West-field Stratford shopping center, after walking past some new office blocks and rather dubious student housing, will find the park is well used and friendly. Subtle in character, the design has surrounded the cleaned-up waterways with a wild-grass landscape that dates it as a product of the early 2010s, but which is also a genuinely pleasant environment.

The landmarks of the park are mostly fun as well: The stadium, now finally in post-Olympic use as the home of the West Ham United football club, isn’t spectacular but has a certain large-scale elegance, while the dramatic swooping roof of the late Zaha Hadid’s Aquatics Centre, one of her most successful projects, is now a municipal swimming pool. Overall, it’s a far cry from the infamous white elephants of Olympics past, such as those of Athens 2004, whose moldering remains are a popular subject for internet rubbernecking.

But there is something that definitely spoils the mood, that lets the whole team down. Unmissable, rising up 376 feet above the park, there is a gigantic steel, um, thing, a twisted, convoluted tower, painted blood red, that has been compared to everything from Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International to a prolapsed bowel. It’s ugly, and not in an “I don’t like modern art” way, but in a more profound sense. It’s professionally ugly—as though someone took some scribbles made trying to get a pen working, fed them through the world’s most advanced engineering software, and somehow got someone to pay for it.

But what actually is it? Well, it’s called the ArcelorMittal Orbit, named after the global steel company owned by one of Britain’s richest men, Lakshmi Mittal, who stumped up some of the money to make it happen. So it’s a branding opportunity. But it’s also supposed to be a public artwork, having been “designed” by the world-famous artist Anish Kapoor and engineer Cecil Balmond. It is additionally a viewing platform, with a lift taking paying guests to an elevated room designed to give panoramic views of East London, despite the fact it is shorter than many of the residential towers nearby. And in fact, since June 2016, it has been a fairground attraction as well, after a giant slide by the artist Carsten Höller was clipped on.

The Orbit cost a lot of money to build—$27 million, of which $4.2 million came from the public budget—and it costs a lot of money to run, apparently losing $700,000 in 2015 alone, despite its expensive ticketed entry. The London taxpayer essentially pays for its upkeep for no municipal benefit, making it the only real failed legacy of the Olympics. And despite the many cooks spoiling the broth of its production, it owes its existence to only one man, for no other reason than that he thought the park needed a bit of zhushing up.

That man was Boris Johnson. He may be a politician, but Johnson is a professional celebrity in true 21st-century fashion, famous for being famous, a character whose main job is to keep himself on the front pages. Born in 1964 into the bohemian wing of the English upper classes, he went to Eton and then read classics at Oxford. There is no more elite route to adulthood. Failing upward through a checkered career in journalism, which included getting fired for lying, he used appearances on television panel shows to cultivate a public persona based upon a recognizable caricature of the confused, fun-loving toff, his shock of naturally white hair and bumbling manner making him a popular figure and...