Hackney Wick: London's Olympic Arts Village

Hackney Wick is London's most concentrated artist community — a waterfront district where the River Lee Navigation canal meets the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, its former industrial buildings converted into hundreds of artist studios, galleries, and creative businesses that have made the area the most significant centre for visual art production in the capital. The warehouses and factories that line the canal were home to industries ranging from chemical manufacturing to piano-making in the 19th and early 20th centuries; since the late 1990s they have been progressively colonized by artists priced out of the East End's earlier creative districts. The density of working studios here — over 700 artists and creative businesses within a small area — is unmatched anywhere in Europe.

The 2012 Olympic Games transformed the adjacent land into the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the largest new park created in London in over a century — 560 acres of parkland, wetland, and sports venues including the Velodrome, Aquatics Centre, and the ArcelorMittal Orbit viewing tower designed by Anish Kapoor with its slide descending from the summit. The East Bank cultural campus currently under development will bring V&A East and BBC Music studios to the park's edge, further concentrating creative activity in this part of the city.

Hackney Wick's main canal strip on the Lea Navigation has developed a weekend food and bar scene in the canal-side units — outdoor spaces, converted barges, and warehouse bars that fill in fine weather with a crowd drawn from across east London. Open Studio weekends (typically in October) open hundreds of artist spaces simultaneously, offering one of the most concentrated access to working artists available anywhere in the city. Overground to Hackney Wick station takes 15 minutes from Liverpool Street.