The importance of public realm has always been at the core of NLA thinking. The second exhibition we held in 2005 was Civilising Spaces - Improving London’s Public Realm; two years later we did another called Public City - Places for People, looking at the new spaces promised by Mayor Ken Livingstone. In 2015, a much more comprehensive study celebrated NLA’s 10th birthday.

 

The public realm strategy under Livingstone was delivered by the Architecture and Urbanism Unit, led by Richard Rogers and Ricky Burdett. It was committed to “making London more walkable, sustainable and beautiful”. Heavily influenced by the work of Jan Gehl in Copenhagen as well as the quality of many European cities, the strategy set out to deliver 100 public spaces, emulating the example of Barcelona which had created 150 new squares and parks since 1980. The projects displayed in the exhibition included Gillett Square, Dalston, Exhibition Road and Brixton Central Square as well as the ill-fated Victoria Embankment Park and Sloane Square proposals. While only a handful of the hundred projects were delivered during Livingstone’s mayoralty the programme changed attitudes to public space. Many parts of the capital have benefitted from its foresight since then.

 

In the catalogue to the exhibition in 2015, we were reminded that such changes take time - it was then 30 years since Richard Rogers first published plans to create a pedestrian-friendly environment in Trafalgar Square, Parliament Square and along the Victoria Embankment, and 30 years since Stuart Lipton, borrowing from the Rockefeller Center in New York, built Broadgate where the spaces between the buildings were as important as the buildings themselves. And it was over 40 years since public protests halted the massive urban road-building programme that prioritised motor vehicles over people. “It has been slow going,” we wrote, “but we have evolved as a city in our understanding of the public realm; from a city where planners believed our climate unsuited to the sorts of piazzas and plazas found in other cities, where local authorities frowned on cafes whose tables and chairs ‘blocked’pavements, to a city that understands the value of good public spaces and that our streets are places too – not merely polluted corridors for vehicular movement.” This is a shift that we must be only too grateful for now as COVID19 reminds us of the importance of high-quality public space in the city.