Roll up, roll up for the all-new Olympia — ‘like Vegas without the sin'

The revamped west London site is just months from opening — complete with a new music venue, theatre, hotels, restaurants and bars. Jonathan Prynn gets a sneak preview

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It is getting close now. The final pieces of the Olympia jigsaw are being rapidly slotted into place. Soon, for example, we will find out who will be the first artist to take the stage at its new 4,000-capacity live music venue when it opens next spring. Nothing has been revealed yet. But in the temporary canteens and offices across the huge building site at the west London development, workers are making the case for their own personal favourites. One tells me he would love it to be Australian heavy metal veterans AC/DC, another dreams of the US rapper Post Malone. We shall see.

The reinvention of Olympia is a big deal for the capital, and west London in particular. Eleven years after Earls Court Exhibition Centre shut its doors forever — with Bombay Bicycle Club as the final act — its venerable sister venue only a mile away is getting smartened up for a remarkable renaissance.

Even wandering around Olympia’s 14-acre site in the cheerless rain and cold of an autumn afternoon it is now possible to get a real sense of what it will offer in about four months’ time.

There are currently 1,700 workers making the final push to complete a destination that its developers hope will attract up to 15 million visitors a year when it is fully up and running by summer 2027.

It will be a remarkable transformation. For as long as anyone can remember, Olympia has been an unwelcome slab of London real estate to all but the lanyard-wearing classes. As joint master-planner Thomas Heatherwick puts it, unless you have a “plastic badge swinging around your neck, it’s dead to you.”