Olympic Park McDonald's

The Olympic Park McDonald’s was a temporary restaurant built for the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London. It stood two hundred yards from the Olympic Stadium in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The pop-up structure covered thirty-two thousand square feet over two floors, making it the largest McDonald’s in the world at the time. Scholars noted its interior design featured the Frutiger Aero style. After six weeks it was dismantled, with most materials reused or recycled. The restaurant served fourteen thousand people daily during the Games. It employed two thousand staff, five hundred working at any one time, mostly top-performing UK employees. The menu included an estimated fifty thousand Big Macs and one hundred and eighty thousand portions of chips. Critics argued the sponsorship contradicted the Games’ promotion of athleticism. Supporters of the deal pointed to the sustainable design and reuse of materials. Visitors found a vast dining space with seating for fifteen hundred. The upper floor was built largely from recycled lumber. Items such as furniture, kitchen equipment and air conditioning units were later used in other McDonald’s restaurants across the country. The building itself was constructed in six weeks and removed in four. Its legacy remained in the recycled materials still in use years later.