About Learning Legacy

Lessons learned from the London 2012 construction project and from preparing and staging the Games.

Raising the bar for the UK’s construction industry

The construction project for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games has been delivered by the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) on time and on budget.

The ODA set itself and the project’s supply chain challenging targets and milestones, most well above industry standards and benchmarks. The majority of these have now been achieved and, in some cases, exceeded: The project has a strong health and safety record, achieved high sustainability outcomes and challenged some of the historic and long-standing inequalities within the UK construction sector.

Learning Legacy’s aim is to share the knowledge and lessons learned from the London 2012 construction project to raise the bar within the construction sector and to act as a showcase for UK plc. The ODA has worked closely with contractors, industry partners, government bodies and academia to capture the lessons learned and document best-practice examples and innovations for the benefit of future projects.

Raising the bar for sustainable major events

Sustainability is still a relatively new concept for the events sector. The London 2012 Games has provided an unrivalled platform to show leadership in this area, transferring knowledge and raising awareness of sustainability issues.  

Like the ODA, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) held itself against a demanding set of standards – in some cases creating a standard where none had previously existed.  LOCOG has captured its lessons learned to share as part of the Learning Legacy for the benefit of the events sector, wider industry and sustainability practitioners more generally. Topics range from carbon footprint and temporary materials to delivering the London 2012 Food Vision, waste management and sustainable sourcing.  

This website categorises Learning Legacy reports and related information from the ODA, LOCOG and some of their partners and suppliers into 10 themes. Within each theme there are short reports, tools and templates, case studies and research summaries that document how this area of work was approached and the lessons that have been learned and the successes that could benefit others.

Raising the bar in the UK's Transport industry

The scope of transport operations for the London 2012 Games was the most demanding the nation’s transport network has ever had to meet and the response of the UK transport industry was to deliver the best public transport Games ever.  In total some £6.5bn was invested in transport schemes that supported the Games. Much of this work was already planned by the main transport operators. In addition the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) invested an extra £500m in schemes to support transport to the venues across the UK and leave a legacy and around another £500m on operations at Games time. 

As an industry a great deal has been learned about how to plan, build and operate a transport network able to meet the unprecedented logistical challenge the Games presented.  There are many tangible legacy benefits – from the infrastructure itself to the enhanced service operations, collaborative working, volunteering, freight and logistics, new ways of working and communication to customers. 

The transport learning legacy has been produced by the ODA with the support of the main transport delivery partners.  It documents the overall picture of how transport for the Games was achieved, what was learned on the way and the transport legacy provided.

Read more about the Learning Legacy project.