ABBA Voyage, Where to Stay, a Walk From the Arena
It's the leaving, not the getting there
Everyone plans how they’ll get to a show. Nobody plans the getting home, and that’s the bit that wrecks the night.
The arena’s at Pudding Mill Lane, on the edge of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, opposite the Pudding Mill Lane DLR. From Adagio it’s roughly ten minutes on foot over the parkland, one DLR stop if your feet are done. It’s purpose built and it sits in the park, so staying in town means travelling out to it and then fighting your way back in the dark with everyone else.
Picture the other version. The show ends, you come out into the cool, and instead of joining the crush for the platform you cut across the grass toward East Village. The crowd’s still singing Dancing Queen behind you, fainter every minute, and you let yourself into your own studio while that queue hasn’t moved. Kettle on, shoes off.
You don't need a car and you'd be daft to bring one
Two stations, Stratford and Stratford International, the DLR, the Central, Jubilee, Elizabeth and Overground, buses, a coach station to the airports. From Heathrow the Elizabeth line comes straight across with no changes, which is the gentlest landing this city gives you. You will not miss a car.
The arena leans the same way. It runs a zero emissions shuttle to Victoria and reckons 86 percent of its London crowd already turns up on foot, by bike or by train. Stay in the park and you’re in that number without even trying to be good.
There's a whole week in it, not just a night
People treat ABBA as the trip. It’s better as the excuse. Westfield Stratford City is close enough that I watched it from the studio window, and it’s got the cinema, the bowling, the food, Sadler’s Wells where you can sit with a drink and co work and nobody moves you on. Walk past it and there’s the old Stratford Shopping Centre, market vendors, there decades before Westfield turned up, still louder than the new place.
Then the green. East Village was built off the back of the 2012 Olympics with proper green space left in it, the runners, the cyclists, the parkland you cross to reach the arena. It got named the best neighbourhood in Newham. You feel why on the walk over before anyone hands you a statistic.
The real reason I book the studio: the kitchen
The kitchenette is the whole thing for me. I can shop local and cook, instead of eating whatever a hotel decides I’m eating.
Every one of the 136 studios has a small kitchen that actually works, hob, fridge, dishwasher, recycling split three ways. I shopped like I do at home, British organic produce in season, carrots, turnips, garlic, leek, kale, my own lentils, pink Himalayan salt, a habanero, and cooked dinner before I went out. I’m plant based and I cook for myself wherever I land, partly for the food, mostly because where it comes from is the whole of my work. On a show night that’s the difference between a proper meal in your own place and queuing twenty minutes for a sad overpriced plate near the arena. Don’t bother with the included breakfast either, it’s bog standard continental, nothing like the local sourcing they advertise.
Is ABBA Voyage itself any good on sustainability?
This bit I actually rate, more than I rate the hotel. The arena was built to come apart, modular, on a 100 percent renewable tariff, with that shuttle to Victoria and 94 percent of its own staff getting to work by foot, bike or train. And the numbers in the ABBA Voyage impact report aren’t small, over 2 billion pounds in UK turnover, 3.5 million visitors, 70.4 million in social value. A venue you can take down and walk to beats a stadium thrown up for one summer, and it’s not close.
The hotel I’m cooler on. It clears the Green Key minimum and not much past it, which I went through in the eco claims breakdown and won’t drag through again here. For ABBA weekend just book it for the walk and the kitchen and the price. The low carbon bit you get thrown in, because of where it sits.
Rates move, so get a current quote, but you can check prices and book Adagio Stratford London through Expedia here.
See you in the park. Wear something you can dance in.
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