FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 7 Building for the Future

Since we had Term Contracts in five Olympic Boroughs, we were a natural contender for the Route contracts.

S o, while the IT team were performing their open heart surgery on the organisation, we had to get on with normal life – except that there was no such thing as normal life in or around London in 2012. For us the London Olympics had started eight years before, in 2004, when we had won the Term Contract for Newham. At that time, the host city for the 2012 Olympics had not yet been chosen; that announcement wasn’t made until the following year. But on the basis that London was a strong contender for the Games, and on the likelihood that Stratford would be chosen as a venue, I had felt it worth taking the risk of putting in a very competitive bid for the Newham Term Contract; and it paid off. What had been quite a poor, backward Borough in terms of spend suddenly had a great deal of money to invest. Our first real planning meetings for the London Games started in 2010 when I visited TfL with Brian Morris and Mark Burnet to talk with Sean Pitcock, who had been tasked with setting up the Steering Group for the Olympic and Paralympic Route Networks (ORN and PRN). TfL needed to ensure that the Olympic VIPs (athletes, officials, etc.) could travel quickly and safely between their hotels and the Olympic Park and other Central London venues. Since we had Term Contracts in five Olympic Boroughs, we were a natural contender for the Route contracts. It also helped that we had our own resources: the depots, the vehicles, the people, and the skills. Not only was this a great chance to ‘showcase’ F.M. Conway to the country and beyond, it was also just the opportunity I had been looking for to get close to TfL and show them what we were capable of. John Holliday, as Project Director, moved into TfL’s offices at Palestra in Blackfriars Road where

Much of the work done on the ORN/PRN was temporary, and involved new thinking and product innovation: sign peels, tape lining, ‘stick down’ kerbs, etc.

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