Winning and delivering the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games is set to become one of the UK's most compelling stories of the early twenty-first century. In just 7 years a talented team of civil engineers and other professionals will have transformed one of the most derelict and neglected sites in Europe into a spectacular theatre for the world's largest sporting event – and laid the foundations for a dramatic regeneration of a large swathe of east London.

The delivery of London 2012 is a great opportunity to promote the civil engineering profession worldwide. The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) has therefore been working with the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) to put together a series of special and themed issues of ICE Proceedings journals to record as much of the processes and lessons learned as possible, of which this is the first. The aim is to showcase the engineering and planning feats associated with embedding sustainability into such a large project and to ensure lessons can be learned and acted upon by the whole built-environment community.

The papers in this special issue of Civil Engineering cover the early ‘planning and people’ stages of the project, from organisation and planning, through environmental and sustainability management, to procurement, employment, safety and transport. A special issue of Civil Engineering on the design and construction of the venues and infrastructure is currently in preparation, and a third issue examining the legacy of the games is planned for the not-too-distant future.