Plans for an indoor snow centre by the London Olympic park have returned from the grave with mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson unveiling new and apparently fully financed plans to build the UK's seventh currently operating indoor snow centre, with the longest British slope yet, next to the Olympic venue as part of his speech on the first anniversary of the 2012 Games.
The new plan talks of a £200m centre with five slopes, the longest 300m, with toboggan run and terrain park, along with shops, restaurants and a hotel to be built by the owners of the adjacent Westfield Shopping Mall and to open, hopefully, by 2015.
It appears to be similar or the same as an Acer Snowmec project proposed for the former Olympic media centre as a legacy facility mooted to be built post games in discussions in 2011, but later ruled out.
Birmingham based Acer Snowmec are the leading designers and snow system suppliers to indoor centres in the UK and around the world where there client list includes Madrid and Dubai snow centres.
There's quite a lot of mis-information about the plans already in mainstream media, reminiscent of some of the stories attached to the over-a-decade-delayed Snoasis (http://www.snoasis.co.uk) project in Suffolk which had hoped to open before the Olympics as a centre of winter sports excellence.
These include claiming that the 300m long main slope and 20,000 sqm snow slope area will make the centre the world's largest (it will put it in the top 10 of the 60 centres operating worldwide but slopes of up to 600m exist in the Netherlands, Germany and France); that Ski Dubai is the world's largest (again it's top 10 but not biggest) and that the 300m slope will be twice the length of the existing longest UK indoor slope (which is 180m, so at the risk of being pedantic, no).
The slope will be the UK's seventh, meaning it Britain will equal the Netherlands in having the most indoor snow centres in one country in the world.
There have been several other indoor snow centre proposals for London over the past two decades.
It is hoped the centre will attract up to three million visitors per year.
It could be the first new indoor snow centre for skiing to open for several years at that point as, since the worldwide economic crash, most newly conceived indoor snow centres have been primarily snow play/activity centres in Asia with shorter slopes or flat snow play areas.
"One year on from London's Olympic and Paralympic Games and we are defying the sceptics who prophesied a herd of white elephants. Westfield's plans for a world-class indoor ski centre (…) underscores the massive confidence in this area from investors which is delivering a real payback for taxpayers in terms of jobs and the regeneration of east London," said London's mayor Boris Johnson.