She was born in Kilkenny in 1973, the eldest of six children, and grew up on a farm. A rural life in Ireland, though, was not for her. “I was always interested in spreading my wings and exploring the world,” says Rosanna Lawes, who in October announced that in spring 2025 she will be stepping down from her job with the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), bringing to an end a vast and remarkable more than 20-year contribution to the creation of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the capital’s hallmark 21st century regeneration project.
Cities attracted her: how they function, change and interact with humankind. She had quantity surveyor relatives in Dublin, whose work interested her. She emerged from her convent education with a leaving certificate containing geography and economics, and went on to secure a diploma in land management at Limerick’s technical college.
After that, by way of the J1 visa scheme, came a few months in New York, where she had many relatives and enjoyed the big city life, supporting herself with casual work. Her college had been working on getting its successful students on to degree courses in Edinburgh and London. Lawes chose London, graduated from South Bank and found a job in the capital with chartered surveyors Wilks, Head and Eve. As she approached the age of 30, she became ready for a change. “I wanted to work in development,” she says. “I wanted to get stuff done”.
In January 2003, she started a job with the London Development Agency (LDA), founded in 2000 under the first Tony Blair-led Labour government as part of its regional growth drive. She was interviewed by the LDA’s director of development, Gareth Blacker. “She came across really well,” Blacker recalls. “You could sense almost immediately that she was a very talented person”. It was a talent Blacker nurtured by involving Lawes in large LDA-backed schemes, such as the progress of the ExCel exhibition and convention centre beside the Royal Victoria Dock in Newham.
By then, a London bid to host the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games was underway. The LDA was very much part of it, sizing up the Lower Lea Valley for a massive, high speed transformation should London prevail. Lawes was among those, also including Blacker, who gathered at the Albannach restaurant and bar on Trafalgar Square in July 2005 to hear the International Olympic Committee announce its big decision in Singapore, and who felt the mixed emotions of delight at London prevailing and anxiety about the task in hand. “We were elated,” she would later recall. “But also a bit head in hands.”
Blacker saw Lawes as an obvious choice for the team that would be needed to address the challenge, which entailed, amongst much else, an enormous planning and land assembly programme. “She had very quickly learned the key things that were needed to close out major deals, move things forward and how to manage multidisciplinary teams,” he says. “Some of that is hard to teach. You need a natural aptitude – an ability to negotiate, an ability to adapt, including your presentational style, depending on who you are talking to, whether it’s politicians, private developers or people who just happen to own bits of land that you need”.
Lawes was still quite young, in her early 30s, and a woman in an industry full of older men: individuals who, as Blacker puts it, “might well have been thinking, ‘there must be somebody more senior I can talk to'”. And yet: “She very quickly established herself as a serious player, not just on the project but in the property industry more widely.”
Other close Olympics colleagues included the LDA’s special projects director Tony Winterbottom, who was hands-on with the land deals, and Mayor Ken Livingstone’s Games adviser, Neale Coleman. She was also involved in the fraught negotiations over ensuring that crowds coming to the Games, especially by public transport, could reach the park by threading through the site of what was to become the Westfield shopping centre in Stratford.
By that time, former Lendlease boss David Higgins had been lined up to head the Olympic Delivery Authority, which would take forward the park’s construction. It was Higgins, backed by the government in the person of John Prescott, who led the wrangling. Lawes was in the room too, on one dead-of-night occasion deciding that the assembled fellow regeneration chiefs, big-time property executives and their respective lawyers could not possibly think straight on empty stomachs and ordering in a load of Chinese food and pizzas. Higgins, though, did not have her takeaway initiative in mind when subsequently saying he considers Lawes, along with Blacker and Winterbottom, so be an unsung hero of the Olympic Park’s success.
A new phase of Lawes’s involvement came when the LLDC was established in March 2012, a mayoral development corporation (MDC) responsible for adapting the park for post-Games use and turning it and its surrounding areas into a fully-formed urban neighbourhood. As development director, she and others, including Coleman, who by that time was working for Livingstone’s successor, Boris Johnson, steered the earliest housebuilding on the park amid an economic climate that was still unfavourable in the wake of the global financial crisis.
It was, though, Johnson’s biggest and boldest contribution to the park that was also to become hers. East Bank, the cultural and educational cluster now nearing completion, wasn’t the idea of the Conservative Mayor alone, but his enthusiastic endorsement of it as a Games legacy centrepiece – initially dubbed Olympicopolis – was vital to its going ahead, with financial help from the Tory-led national government. All that remained was to get it built.
“My job was to take away that brief that Neale and Boris put together and figure out how to do it,” Lawes says. “That was one hell of a challenge.” Along with the LLDC chief executive of the time, Dennis Hone, they set about solving the numerous problems of securing the involvement of five major institutions, each with its own priorities and needs. “You’re having five separate conversations all the time,” says Lawes,” and marrying different and complex requirements.”
Her job was, as she puts it, “to figure out how the commercial contracts would work, figure out how we would do the deals, how we would pull the masterplan and the design team together”. While one of the five partners, UCL (University College London), was able to proceed at largely its own pace on its two semi-detached footprints, one either side of the Waterworks River, the homes of the other four – Sadler’s Wells, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the London College of Fashion (LCF, part of the University of the Arts, London) and, eventually, the BBC – have had to be fitted together like a terrace on a tight waterfront site.
It’s been a difficult journey, costing more money than intended and disrupted by the pandemic. But London’s third Mayor, Sadiq Khan, put his weight behind it and Johnson, when Prime Minister, stumped up more financial help when it was needed. All the partners have stayed on board. “The people relationships were so important,” says Lawes, who became the LLDC’s executive director of development in 2014. “I probably spent most of my time on all of that, making sure that I built trust and goodwill. That has lived through to today. It is basically diplomacy. There’s never any taking sides, it’s like negotiating a complex peace agreement.”
People skills and maths skills aren’t always found in the same person, but in Lawes they seem to have co-existed and complemented each other. “Rosanna’s contribution to regeneration has been colossal,” says Richard Brown, who was himself involved in making London 2012 happen from the earliest stages, facilitating collaboration between Livingstone’s City Hall and Blair’s Westminster. “From the very start, she was at the heart of it, focussing her team on the long-term, calmly navigating the political cross-winds and maintaining good humour despite everything.”
Blacker, these days executive director of delivery at the Old Oak and Park Royal MDC, says much the same, noting her ability to both master complex documents and be popular with colleagues. He describes what’s been achieved at East Bank as “phenomenal”.
What next? East Bank’s final pieces are falling into place. In the early part of 2025, work is expected to begin on the four blocks of flats to be appended to the waterfront row and help 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 different part of the park, will open in May 2025).
Lawes will leave the Olympic stage on 31 March, bringing to an end an unbroken association with the project that stretches back to its earliest days. Transport minister Lord Peter Hendy, the former Transport for London commissioner and Network Rail chair who was also the LLDC’s chair for seven years from July 2017 until joining the government’s team, pays tribute to her “drive and vision” in helping to create “not just the venue of the wonderful Games we all remember, but the park and beautiful neighbourhoods we now have”.
Lawes herself hopes to bring her Olympic project experience to bear on something else large and difficult before too long. “I’m interested in something else big,” she says. “I like working on big, complex, strategic projects and problems.” The still-new Labour government has set up a New Towns taskforce and pledged to work with regional Mayors to foster economic growth. It’s going to need people with the know-how and experience of Rosanna Lawes. There aren’t too many of them around.
Photo of Rosanna Lawes from the LLDC. Dave Hill is the author of Olympic Park: When Britain Built Something Big. Follow him on Bluesky.
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