Introduction

Olympia is an exhibition centre, event space and conference centre in West Kensington, London. The venue is home to a range of international trade and consumer exhibitions, conferences and events. Olympia has been a mainstay in the world exhibition trade for over 130 years and currently attracts over 1.6m visitors a year across 220 event days. The Olympia Estate was successfully acquired by Yoo Capital and German institutional investors in 2017, with the intention to comprehensively redevelop the Estate to provide a broad mix of creative and commercial land uses.

Momentum has been working since July 2017 on the long-term vision and masterplan for the 14 acres Olympia Estate. The masterplan proposes to remove the existing event related traffic from the adjacent highway network and provide 2.5 acres of attractive public realm to serve the wider range of uses to be introduced on site and complement and enhance the current exhibition halls, including two hotels, one theatre, one music venue, one cinema, office space and co-working and retail.

As part of the design team, we have developed access strategies for goods vehicles servicing the estate, as well as strategies for improving the future visitors’ access to the site both during construction and once implemented. This included data analytics on vehicles movements to define the space requirements for the logistics hub, identifying key pedestrian links, extensive traffic modelling, parking surveys, station modelling and pedestrian comfort level assessments. We have engaged with residents and officers from the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham and Transport for London as part of the pre-application process and post-planning engagement.