Work starts this week on Olympic Stadium

Site huts will be erected for the main Olympic Stadium this week after preparatory work on the project was brought forward by another four months.

Work was originally due to start next summer but had been brought forward to 14 April. That date has now been moved again with setting-up work due to start imminently.

Sir Robert McAlpine is leading the consortium charged with building the £500m centrepiece of the London 2012 Games.

An Olympic source said: "The site huts are now going on the job and McAlpine's team will be in there making a start on things in terms of getting ready for construction to start.

"The contractors are all in place and it didn't make much sense to delay things so the main team has now started the ball rolling now the huts have been installed."

Final designs for the stadium were unveiled last month with 80,000 seats for the duration of the Games.

After the London Olympics the stadium's upper tier and roof will be dismantled to leave the lower-tier forming a 25,000-seat stadium for legacy use.

Completion of the stadium had originally been pencilled in for the middle of 2011, but that could now be achieved by the end of 2010.

The source said: "Hopefully everyone can just get on and build it now. There's been so much talk about the design and legacy it will just be a relief now to start putting some foundations in the ground and to get on with the construction work."

Speeding up of the contract has been possible thanks to quicker-than-expected remediation works. The site was handed over to the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) in July and virtually all of the original 33 buildings have been demolished.

Ground levels vary across the stadium site and some parts will have to be lowered by 9m, while others areas need to be raised by 5m.

Around 600,000 tonnes of soil is currently being taken away from the site to help create the construction platform for the stadium.

An ODA spokesman said: "The site is being set-up in terms of preparing to put in site offices, but nothing has changed in terms of a start date and work is still planned to start two to three months early as we've said.

"There is still a significant amount of earthworks to be carried out before construction proper can start."

Stadium timeline

13 October 2006: Team McAlpine named preferred bidder for stadium.

24 July 2007: ODA signs Memorandum of Understanding with Sir Robert McAlpine for stadium construction.

6 November 2007: ODA announces that construction work will start April 2008.

7 November 2007: 2012 Stadium design unveiled.

26 November 2007: Leyton Orient 'confident' about using stadium 'in legacy'.

12 December 2007: Site huts to be erected.