Boleyn Ground & London Stadium

Culture Secretary Chris Smith removed athletics from the rebuilding of Wembley in December 1999. A new stadium was announced at Picketts Lock in the Lower Lea Valley in March 2000 to host the 2005 World Championships in Athletics; Britain withdrew from those championships in October 2001 and the stadium was cancelled on cost grounds. When Beijing was awarded the 2008 Games that same year, the way opened for London to bid for 2012. Mayor Livingstone backed a bid on condition that it regenerated east London and named Stratford as the site in 2002; the government approved a bid in May 2003, and London won the most votes in July 2005.

The government's brief was for an athletics stadium largely to be taken apart after the Games, its lower tier left as a permanent facility replacing the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre. On 13 October 2006 the London organising committee opened exclusive negotiations with Sir Robert McAlpine and the architects Populous, no other bidder having met the criteria. Construction formally began on 22 May 2008, three months early. A permanent sunken bowl held 25,000 seats and a demountable upper tier a further 55,000; the stadium used about 10,700 tons of steel, just under a quarter of the amount in Beijing's 2008 Olympic stadium. It was finished in March 2011, reported on time and under budget, with the Mondo track laid that October.

The press was mixed: Building Design's Ellis Woodman called the dismountable principle welcome but the architecture "pretty underwhelming". It lost the 2012 Stirling Prize to the Sainsbury Laboratory at Cambridge.

Its first public event was the National Lottery Olympic Park Run on 31 March 2012, and nine-year-old Niamh Clarke-Willis opened the stadium ceremonially that May. It held the opening and closing ceremonies of both the Olympic and Paralympic Games, with 70,500 LED "paddles" fitted between the seats to turn the grandstands into a single video screen, which took a Guinness World Record for the largest landscape video display. During the Olympic athletics David Rudisha set a world record for the 800 metres, becoming the first man to run the distance in under 1 minute 41 seconds.

Bidding for the stadium's future opened in 2010, the winner to own it. Two bids were shortlisted that November: Tottenham Hotspur with Anschutz Entertainment Group, proposing to knock it down and rebuild a football-only ground, and West Ham United with Newham Council, proposing a conversion to 66,000 seats that kept the running track. West Ham were selected on 11 February 2011. A review followed that July after The Times found that the legacy company's director of services had been engaged by West Ham for consultancy work without permission; investigators ruled the process uncompromised.

The award was cancelled on 11 October 2011, the legacy company concluding that the stadium should stay in public ownership and be leased to an anchor tenant, after concerns that legal challenges and a state-aid complaint to the European Commission would leave it empty for years. A second process, requiring the track to remain, named West Ham preferred bidder in December 2012; the club signed a 99-year lease on 22 March 2013 and UK Athletics took a 50-year deal that July.

Conversion began on 13 August 2013 with the removal of 25,000 seats and the pitch, and a new roof of 45,000 square metres built to cover every seat. West Ham moved from the Boleyn Ground in August 2016, opening with a 3-0 Europa League win over NK Domžale on 4 August, sold out at a capacity still reduced to 54,000. Crowd trouble marred the club's games early in the 2016-17 season, and for disturbances at a Burnley match in March 2018 the Football Association fined it £100,000 in January 2019, criticising the stadium operator over steward cuts and poor training.

The ground has stayed in public hands. E20 Stadium LLP was formed by the London Legacy Development Corporation and Newham Council in July 2012, and Vinci was appointed in 2015 to run the stadium for 25 years through a subsidiary, London Stadium 185, which the corporation bought in January 2019. In January 2025 the corporation passed its interest to GLA Holdings, a Greater London Authority subsidiary, and E20 was renamed London Stadium LLP that April. The stadium has also staged 2015 Rugby World Cup pool matches, the 2017 World Athletics and World Para Athletics Championships, and in June 2019 the first Major League Baseball regular-season games played in Europe.