In 2008 NLA organised an exhibition on ‘London’s towns’. In the same year Boris Johnson’s ‘blue doughnut strategy’ – focusing on outer London Tory voters - won him the mayoralty in the capital. To pay his supporters back Johnson had to pursue a much more suburban-friendly policy than his predecessor Ken Livingstone whose nickname had been the ‘Zone 1 Mayor’ because of his focus on the Central Activity Zone.

 

As a result Johnson had more engagement with the outer London boroughs than Livingstone; among other things, he set up the Outer London Commission and created the Outer London Fund to regenerate failing town centres. The funding supported public space improvements, wayfinding, shopfront improvements as well as non-physical interventions like marketing and management.

 

It was not until Jules Pipe became Deputy Mayor for Planning in 2016 following the election of Sadiq Khan as Mayor that there was a more holistic approach to the economic health of London’s town centres. The new, and yet to be adopted, London Plan suggests town centres are appropriate locations for residential-led intensification or mixed-use development that makes best use of landcapitalising on the availability of services within walking and cycling distances and public transport provision.

 

This ‘town centres first’ approach, was the focus of NLA’s exhibition and research of 2017 on ‘Shaping the Polycentric City’. When we first proposed this title it got a pretty negative response - ‘no-one will know what you mean’. But we stuck with it and the term is now regularly used by politicians as well as planners to describe changes that are taking place in London as outer areas experience increased development. It is a change that is taking place in other major cities like Sydney, San Francisco, Stockholm and Toronto.

 

London works as a polycentric city because that’s the way it developed, with the historic towns that surrounded the traditional core growing until they formed a single metropolis. This shift towards polycentricity will surely be boosted by COVID 19. Lockdown has given us a greater appreciation of our surrounding areas, our local shops and centres have become more important at a time when we cannot travel. The likely increase in home working as well as the long term impact of physical distancing on public transport use suggest that planning of mixed-use town centres where people can live, work and play - as opposed to the dormitory policies of the past - is the way forward.