The task is no less than to guide the long-term physical development of one of the world’s greatest cities. Set against this the resources are scant and the timetable brief in the extreme. (LPAC January 1987)
Following unprecedented deindustrialisation after the second world war, the slow abandonment of Docklands that started in the 1960s and the collapse in its population, London was by the early 1980s on its knees. There were parts of inner London where the unemployment rate ran at over 20 per cent.
The bitter process of abolishing the Greater London Council (GLC) from 1983-1986 left the capital without its own form of government for the first time since the late nineteenth century. Individual policy responsibilities were divided out among a myriad of bodies: Ministers, arrangements of boroughs and separate organisations.
However, given London’s significant influence within the wider south-east it was unclear how the boroughs, individually or collectively, would input into regional planning strategy. After some cajoling, Government established the London Planning Advisory Committee (LPAC), a statutory committee of all London boroughs to advise on strategic planning matters.
This website sets out to tell the story of LPAC’s role in the establishment of London as the pre-eminent global city of the first part of the 21st century. It is a story of the value of soft power and how open, collaborative and focused leadership can bring about change.
LPAC was a committee of 32 local Councillors, (plus a representative from the City), who each led on planning matters for their respective local authority. Following the local elections of May 1986, LPAC had a delicate political balance made up as it was of 15 Labour Members, 14 Conservative Members, 3 SDP-Lib Dem Alliance Members and 1 Independent (the City).
The Committee was, for most of its existence, chaired by an Alliance member representing Richmond – Cllr Sally Hamwee (now Lib Dem peer Baroness Hamwee), who, against the odds, successfully kept LPAC in operation and the political parties working together when many commentators expected it to fold. Cllr Peter Broadbent was her first Deputy Chairman and Leader of the Labour Group, while Cllr Bob Coatman was Vice-Chairman and Leader of the Conservative Group.[1]
Nicky Gavron joined the Committee as lead member for Haringey in 1988 and became the Labour lead member in 1989. She would go on to become Chair in 1994.
Nicky sadly passed away in 2024, but in the last few years of her life she was determined to find a way to tell the story of LPAC and its influence and role in shaping the London of the 2000s, a story which she felt had been overlooked by academics, researchers and commentators.
As part of Nicky’s research, she led interviews of many of the people who worked for LPAC or who had influence over policy development in London at the time. As was Nicky’s inclination, one interview would reveal further sources that needed to be contacted and spoken to. The list never shortened, only lengthen as time went on. Unfortunately, Nicky’s untimely death meant that many people who should have been interviewed weren’t and while the LPAC story has had to be told without their input, it is hopefully not deficient to any significant extent.
At the heart of her research was her extensive archive of documents and papers. Buried in boxes piled high in a study in her home, she enlisted the help of colleagues, friends and family to begin the process of bringing some sort of order to the more than 5000 reports, policy papers and personal communications in her collection.
[1] While Nicky was able to discuss with Sally and Peter their memories of their time on LPAC as part of the research for this website, Bob Coatman sadly died in 2011.
LPAC was a space of invention, innovation, creativity because you’re operating in the margins of where formal and informal power belonged. And therefore, you could create, had to create coalitions. It’s the ability to turn the soft power into hard power (through the process of advocacy and institution building) that creates really resilient urban governance institutions. (Greg Clark)
What LPAC was trying to do was to create a new way of seeing the city and a new way of organising it. It sought to make strategic planning more than just about land use and to force Government to take a more holistic approach, to join the dots, linking transport investment to housing developments to workplace opportunities. Through its research it sought to get a better grasp on how the forces of globalisation were changing the economic base and the demographic make-up of London, and to help direct resources into both the strategic, and local investments that would make the city a better place to live and work.
LPAC was also determined to reach out to the wider public, to engage all those interested in their local spaces and in their great city, to contribute to the discussion about how best to re-shape the capital. In the days before widespread use of the internet and the ubiquitous postings on social media, consultation had a more physical form, some five thousand copies of the first LPAC document “Policy and Choices” were printed for distribution by LPAC and the broughs, and two Greater London Conferences were held alongside four smaller scale sub-regional conferences to discuss issues and garner views.
LPAC prepared the groundwork for the smooth transition to a new form of government for London, an elected Mayor in 2000, by working to establish partnerships and alliances, particularly with the private sector, around a unifying vision of London as a World City. In so doing it successfully re-defined the relationship between the boroughs and the private sector and a regional tier after the bitterness of the 1980s.
The London Archive has kindly agreed to host the archive where it will join their collection of LPAC agenda papers and meeting minutes and thus be available for the public to access. But Nicky’s was also keen to ensure that there was a mechanism by which context could be provided for the documents and that, most importantly for her, the role, impact and legacy of LPAC’s work could be evidenced.
At the heart of her research was her extensive archive of documents and papers. Buried in boxes piled high in a study in her home, Broadlands, she enlisted the help of colleagues, friends and family to begin the process of bringing some sort of order to the more than 5000 reports, policy papers and personal communications in her collection. The London Archive has kindly agreed to host the archive where it will join their collection of LPAC agenda papers and meeting minutes and thus be available for the public to access. But Nicky was also keen to ensure that there was a mechanism by which context could be provided for the documents and that, most importantly for her, the role, impact and legacy of LPAC’s work could be evidenced.
Hence this website.
You bring in as many people as possible. Because of that way of working. Because of that very collaborative open nature … you get innovation. (Nicky Gavron)
LPAC was created in the wake of the GLC’s abolition with limited powers but an ambitious goal: to keep a strategic vision for London alive. With cross-party collaboration, high-quality research, and a commitment to joined-up thinking, it played a vital role in shaping policy on housing, transport, the environment, and London’s global positioning.
This page explores the scale and substance of LPAC’s impact—its pioneering ideas, its successes, and the lessons still relevant today. It also highlights the challenges it faced, the opportunities it missed, and the legacy it handed over to the Greater London Authority.
Thanks must go first to the good people at The London Society who when presented with the idea of hosting the material jumped at the idea and have proved tireless in their support and encouragement. Nicky would have been thrilled to have had this connection and it is a fitting place for a tribute to her and her work.
The London Archive has provided regular access to the full set of LPAC agendas and minutes, alongside a collection of additional documents it stores. It will also now hold Nicky’s LPAC papers, for which big thanks must go to Sally Bevan who right from the off has seen value in the archive and helped to facilitate its transfer.
There is a large group of former LPAC stalwarts including Martin Simmons, John Lett, Keith Gardner and Debbie McMullen who all contributed material, time and energy to keep the project moving forward. Sorting out the archive, itself requiring Herculean efforts, was largely the work of Ollie Carr, Noga Inspector and Hannah Leigh.
The project also benefitted from support from Georgia Cameron, Greg Clark and Michael Hebbert who helped to shepherd the early ideas into some kind of coherent story that, hopefully, will be of interest not only to specialist planners but also those who want to think through all aspects of how to shape policy and create a sustainable city in the face of powerful, but uncertain, global economic forces and ever shifting political winds.
Special thanks must go to Katie Machin and Tony Cumberbirch, people dear to Nicky, who were there from the start and never refused a request for help.
A project such as this, although it has no claim to be an academic work, sits within a research space where planning meets urban studies, albeit firmly within contemporary London studies.
Urban studies in the UK evolved from early public health research to become an interdisciplinary field encompassing planning, economics, sociology, and environmental studies. The London School of Economics and the Universities of Sheffield and Newcastle led the way in the 1960s, often with a focus on the impact of deindustrialisation. The emergence of a distinct field of academic and wider research about cities was a slow burn, emerging often from the field of economic geography, leading to post-industrial and global cities research programmes in the 1990s and 2000s at Manchester, the LSE, Oxford and Cambridge, with Professor Saskia Sassen’s work on the “Global City” theory being hugely influential.
The academic study of planning in the UK has likewise evolved, in its way from early town planning courses at Liverpool and UCL at the turn of the twentieth century to a diverse field spanning economic, social, environmental, and community aspects of planning with other universities (including Manchester and Cardiff) now also playing crucial roles in expanding research beyond traditional town planning, to help influence policy and governance.
These fields of research, once distinct, now feed into, influence and shape each other, and with good intent. Understanding what makes a “good city” – one that’s sustainable, dynamic, entrepreneurial and a good place to live and work – is now a pressing issue for researchers, politicians, community activists and others, as global rates of urbanisation continue to increase.
A wide range of texts, some academic, some from authors targeting a more general readership, have been drawn upon to help provide context for the LPAC story. Special mention should go to Ben Pimlott and Nirmala Rao’s hugely insightful and richly detailed “Governing London” (2002), Michael Hebbert’s “London – More by fortune than design” (1998), one of a series of World city studies, which provides sweeping historical depth to his city portrait, Jerry White’s ever readable “London in the 20th century” (2001) heavily influenced the section on London in the 1980s, while Tony Travers and Michael Hebbert’s “The London Government Handbook” (1988) helped to clarify the myriad of governance arrangements that fell out from the abolition of the GLC in 1986.
This website is dedicated to the memory of Nicky Gavron, whose passion for London’s future was matched only by her determination to preserve its past. In her final years, she worked tirelessly to uncover and share the untold story of LPAC—its influence, its legacy, and its role in shaping the London we know today.
Content creator and writer Richard Derecki
The Greater London Council (GLC) was born from bold ambition—and buried under political fire. Created in 1965 to provide strategic oversight for a rapidly expanding capital, it was always a contested and complex institution. This is the story of its rise, its battles, and the creation of its replacement: the London Planning Advisory Committee (LPAC).
