She was born in Kilkenny in 1973, the eldest of six kids, and grew up on a farm. A rural life in Eire, although, was not for her. “I used to be at all times interested by spreading my wings and exploring the world,” says Rosanna Lawes, who in October introduced that in spring 2025 she will probably be stepping down from her job with the London Legacy Growth Company (LLDC), bringing to an finish an unlimited and noteworthy greater than 20-year contribution to the creation of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the capital’s hallmark twenty first century regeneration venture.
Cities attracted her: how they perform, change and work together with humankind. She had amount surveyor relations in Dublin, whose work her. She emerged from her convent training with a leaving certificates containing geography and economics, and went on to safe a diploma in land administration at Limerick’s technical school.
After that, by means of the J1 visa scheme, got here a number of months in New York, the place she had many relations and loved the large metropolis life, supporting herself with informal work. Her school had been engaged on getting its profitable college students on to diploma programs in Edinburgh and London. Lawes selected London, graduated from South Financial institution and located a job within the capital with chartered surveyors Wilks, Head and Eve. As she approached the age of 30, she grew to become prepared for a change. “I needed to work in growth,” she says. “I needed to get stuff achieved”.
In January 2003, she began a job with the London Growth Company (LDA), based in 2000 below the primary Tony Blair-led Labour authorities as a part of its regional development drive. She was interviewed by the LDA’s director of growth, Gareth Blacker. “She got here throughout rather well,” Blacker remembers. “You would sense nearly instantly that she was a really gifted particular person”. It was a expertise Blacker nurtured by involving Lawes in giant LDA-backed schemes, such because the progress of the ExCel exhibition and conference centre beside the Royal Victoria Dock in Newham.
By then, a London bid to host the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Video games was underway. The LDA was very a lot a part of it, sizing up the Decrease Lea Valley for an enormous, excessive velocity transformation ought to London prevail. Lawes was amongst these, additionally together with Blacker, who gathered on the Albannach restaurant and bar on Trafalgar Sq. in July 2005 to listen to the Worldwide Olympic Committee announce its huge determination in Singapore, and who felt the blended feelings of enjoyment at London prevailing and anxiousness in regards to the activity in hand. “We had been elated,” she would later recall. “But additionally a bit head in palms.”
Blacker noticed Lawes as an apparent selection for the crew that might be wanted to handle the problem, which entailed, amongst a lot else, an unlimited planning and land meeting programme. “She had in a short time realized the important thing issues that had been wanted to shut out main offers, transfer issues ahead and how you can handle multidisciplinary groups,” he says. “A few of that’s exhausting to show. You want a pure aptitude – a capability to barter, a capability to adapt, together with your presentational fashion, relying on who you might be speaking to, whether or not it’s politicians, personal builders or individuals who simply occur to personal bits of land that you just want”.
Lawes was nonetheless fairly younger, in her early 30s, and a girl in an trade filled with older males: people who, as Blacker places it, “may nicely have been pondering, ‘there have to be any person extra senior I can discuss to’”. And but: “She in a short time established herself as a critical participant, not simply on the venture however within the property trade extra extensively.”
Different shut Olympics colleagues included the LDA’s particular tasks director Tony Winterbottom, who was hands-on with the land offers, and Mayor Ken Livingstone’s Video games adviser, Neale Coleman. She was additionally concerned within the fraught negotiations over making certain that crowds coming to the Video games, particularly by public transport, may attain the park by threading by means of the positioning of what was to develop into the Westfield purchasing centre in Stratford.
By that point, former Lendlease boss David Higgins had been lined as much as head the Olympic Supply Authority, which might take ahead the park’s building. It was Higgins, backed by the federal government within the particular person of John Prescott, who led the wrangling. Lawes was within the room too, on one dead-of-night event deciding that the assembled fellow regeneration chiefs, big-time property executives and their respective legal professionals couldn’t presumably assume straight on empty stomachs and ordering in a load of Chinese language meals and pizzas. Higgins, although, didn’t have her takeaway initiative in thoughts when subsequently saying he considers Lawes, together with Blacker and Winterbottom, so be an unsung hero of the Olympic Park’s success.
A brand new section of Lawes’s involvement got here when the LLDC was established in March 2012, a mayoral growth company (MDC) chargeable for adapting the park for post-Video games use and turning it and its surrounding areas right into a fully-formed city neighbourhood. As growth director, she and others, together with Coleman, who by that point was working for Livingstone’s successor, Boris Johnson, steered the earliest housebuilding on the park amid an financial local weather that was nonetheless unfavourable within the wake of the worldwide monetary disaster.
It was, although, Johnson’s largest and boldest contribution to the park that was additionally to develop into hers. East Financial institution, the cultural and academic cluster now nearing completion, wasn’t the concept of the Conservative Mayor alone, however his enthusiastic endorsement of it as a Video games legacy centrepiece – initially dubbed Olympicopolis – was very important to its going forward, with monetary assist from the Tory-led nationwide authorities. All that remained was to get it constructed.
“My job was to remove that temporary that Neale and Boris put collectively and work out how you can do it,” Lawes says. “That was one hell of a problem.” Together with the LLDC chief government of the time, Dennis Hone, they set about fixing the quite a few issues of securing the involvement of 5 main establishments, every with its personal priorities and desires. “You’re having 5 separate conversations on a regular basis,” says Lawes,” and marrying totally different and complicated necessities.”
Her job was, as she places it, “to determine how the business contracts would work, work out how we might do the offers, how we might pull the masterplan and the design crew collectively”. Whereas one of many 5 companions, UCL (College Faculty London), was in a position to proceed at largely its personal tempo on its two semi-detached footprints, one both facet of the Waterworks River, the houses of the opposite 4 – Sadler’s Wells, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the London Faculty of Vogue (LCF, a part of the College of the Arts, London) and, ultimately, the BBC – have needed to be fitted collectively like a terrace on a decent waterfront web site.
It’s been a troublesome journey, costing more cash than meant and disrupted by the pandemic. However London’s third Mayor, Sadiq Khan, put his weight behind it and Johnson, when Prime Minister, stumped up extra monetary assist when it was wanted. All of the companions have stayed on board. “The folks relationships had been so vital,” says Lawes, who grew to become the LLDC’s government director of growth in 2014. “I most likely spent most of my time on all of that, ensuring that I constructed belief and goodwill. That has lived by means of to at present. It’s mainly diplomacy. There’s by no means any taking sides, it’s like negotiating a posh peace settlement.”
Folks abilities and maths abilities aren’t at all times present in the identical particular person, however in Lawes they appear to have co-existed and complemented one another. “Rosanna’s contribution to regeneration has been colossal,” says Richard Brown, who was himself concerned in making London 2012 occur from the earliest levels, facilitating collaboration between Livingstone’s Metropolis Corridor and Blair’s Westminster. “From the very begin, she was on the coronary heart of it, focussing her crew on the long-term, calmly navigating the political cross-winds and sustaining good humour regardless of every thing.”
Blacker, lately government director of supply on the Previous Oak and Park Royal MDC, says a lot the identical, noting her capacity to each grasp advanced paperwork and be fashionable with colleagues. He describes what’s been achieved at East Financial institution as “phenomenal”.
What subsequent? East Financial institution’s ultimate items are falling into place. Within the early a part of 2025, work is anticipated to start on the 4 blocks of flats to be appended to the waterfront row and assist to pay for it. UCL and LCF are already in use. Tickets are on sale for February’s opening Sadler’s Wells East programme. The BBC’s music studios, too, will open in 2025 and the V&A East Museum in Spring 2026 (the separate V&A Storehouse, on a special a part of the park, will open in Could 2025).
Lawes will depart the Olympic stage on 31 March, bringing to an finish an unbroken affiliation with the venture that stretches again to its earliest days. Transport minister Lord Peter Hendy, the previous Transport for London commissioner and Community Rail chair who was additionally the LLDC’s chair for seven years from July 2017 till becoming a member of the federal government’s crew, pays tribute to her “drive and imaginative and prescient” in serving to to create “not simply the venue of the great Video games all of us bear in mind, however the park and delightful neighbourhoods we now have”.
Lawes herself hopes to carry her Olympic venture expertise to bear on one thing else giant and troublesome earlier than too lengthy. “I’m interested by one thing else huge,” she says. “I like engaged on huge, advanced, strategic tasks and issues.” The still-new Labour authorities has arrange a New Cities taskforce and pledged to work with regional Mayors to foster financial development. It’s going to want folks with the know-how and expertise of Rosanna Lawes. There aren’t too a lot of them round.
Picture of Rosanna Lawes from the LLDC. Dave Hill is the creator of Olympic Park: When Britain Constructed One thing Massive. Comply with him on Bluesky.
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