How I teach the Olympic Park
Written April 2025
In recent years I’ve made a real effort to share, as widely as possible, my work on and resources for teaching the Regenerating Places topic of Edexcel A-Level Geography. This blog is the latest part of that effort and follows on from other posts previously shared.
Those previous posts can be found here:
1. How I teach Regenerating Places
2. Beyond the Specification: Regeneration
3. Stratford for urban fieldwork
4. X-minute cities
5. Brent Cross Town: Your Next Case Study?
In this blog I want to go into more detail about the resources I use to teach the Olympic Park regeneration. As I explained when writing about Regenerating Places topic more broadly, the Olympic Park is one of (at least) three in-depth case studies that I use to teach most of EQ3 and EQ4 (the others are Cornwall and Battersea Power Station but we will also do Brent Cross Town if time allows). We work through the story of the regeneration project using a wide array of different resources but always return to my much-loved A3 summary sheets where students summarise our discussions and their notes under the spec points. This is to ensure that they know how everything we’ve discussed matches up to what they might be questioned on in the exam and thus how they can apply their knowledge to a wide range of questions. As you can tell from these sheets, we cover or revisit 4.7a, all of 4.8, 4.9a, all of 4.10 and all of 4.11 through studying the Olympic Park.
My teaching of the case study starts by making sure that students are aware of just how significant the change in the area in and around the Olympic Park has been over the past 15 years. This has become increasingly important as the 2012 Olympics fade from the lived experience of our students and some start to question why we’re still learning about it in 2025. This graphic proves invaluable to make the point (as does, of course, the development that continues apace today).
We’ll discuss what’s happened in the Olympic Park regeneration project, the timeline of the development, and important facts and figures. Students will annotate this map of the Olympic Park (printed as A4 size onto A3 with space around) with key information. We watch this clip to get a sense of place and use this handout with information taken from the Olympic Park website. Depending on whether or not they studied the Olympic Park at GCSE, I might consolidate this introduction by using this independent lesson from the GEO resources as homework.
Early in the teaching of this case study we explore the tensions that exist between different stakeholders with regard to the regeneration of Stratford. We use the Focus E15 group as an example of a local interest group and look at their various campaigns. This post from March 2025 is up-to-date and engaging for use with students. Much of the work of the Focus E15 group has centred on the Carpenters Estate and so although teaching will concentrate on the Olympic Park, we will learn about the estate given its significance in the story of the area and the complicated history and controversies of its own regeneration. The resources I use to teach the Carpenters Estate will be shared in a separate blog soon but this article, given as a handout here, is key.
Although it is old now, I still think there is value in asking students to watch this 4-part YouTube documentary about the Olympics and the thoughts of people at the time of the games in 2012. I will often set it for homework after our lesson covering 4.8ab (so, a short while ahead of starting this case study) and ask students to make sure that can answer the following questions in depth:
What was the Olympic Park like before it was redeveloped?
At the time of recording, what were local people’s thoughts and concerns about the regeneration and hosting the Olympics?
Having looked at the tensions between different groups (4.8b), this article is used alongside a series of social media posts to show how different stakeholders will assess the success of regeneration using contrasting criteria (4.11c). The screenshots from my slides that are shown below show the short extracts of text we will use to discuss this idea further.
As mentioned in this previous blog, whilst studying the Olympic Park, gentrification arises as a concept and an issue. Whilst it is not explicitly mentioned on the spec, I find value in teaching it and use this RGS lecture to do so. Recently I stumbled across this article about the change to Stratford following the regeneration and, depending on the cohort, would use it to further discuss changes in the area and the complexity of drawing conclusions about the ‘success’ of regeneration.
To teach 4.10 about the measurement and assessment of the success of regeneration, this ONS Custom Area profile is used alongside IMD data. Page 6 of this report proves invaluable for facts and figures to teach 4.10c.
As we work through these various resources, resources from the OUP Kerboodle package are used to check for understanding. As in all of my Regenerating Places resources, these are used with students to check their understanding of the core content of what we’re studying and an example relating to this case study is shown below.
Finally, I like to use this case study as an opportunity to introduce students to some more challenging academic reading. Of course, it will depend on your cohort, but these 2 articles are the best that I’ve found (balancing accessibility with relevance to what we study) and are, in time allows, well worth unpacking in the classroom- even if not used in their entirety. The articles can be accessed here and here.
If you know of any other high-quality resources that I could be using, please do let me know! I update this case study every year and am always on the look-out for the best that is out there!