In 2004, when the London Plan was first published, the Regents Network, a campaign group dedicated to protecting the Regent’s Canal from overdevelopment, had posed a question to the then-Mayor’s office asking about the promotion and publicity of the new strategic plan of which they had been involved for years in its inception and drafting. They received a “curt reply” stating that “the London Plan did not need publicity as it will be firmly established by way of its status and authority.” ¹ This may explain why there are few publicity pictures related to the 2021 London Plan. The above photograph of Mayor Sadiq Khan holding a copy of his draft plan when it launched, is one of the rare press to be found. ² ⊕ Mayor Sadiq Khan holding a copy of 2017 London Plan Draft for Consultation. Source: Evening Standard The absence reinforces the contradiction in Mayor Khan’s foreword of the publication that not many Londoners know about the London Plan or will have come across it despite it being a ‘crucial’ document to their everyday lives. ⊕ Mayor of London Planning (@LDN_planning). 2 March 2021. Tweet. The dearth of publicity and the quiet, assumed importance of the London Plan is a stark contrast to the publicity blitz of the County of London Plan (1943) when planning was at its most visible and visions of a new London could be found in mess halls, exhibition halls, underground stations, cinemas and classrooms.

Chapter 3 sketched out the participatory turn in planning practice toward more people-involved rather than sole expert, planner-devised planning. Importantly, what planning turned away from was publicity. Francesca Sartorio notes that the 1947 Planning Act publicity was not seen as something particularly worthwhile or important in planning. ³ The 1968 Planning Act introduced statutory requirements for publicity and participation in the plan development system, with a provision for adequate publicity in connection with a local authority’s plan preparation. ⁴ Arthur Skeffington and his Committee were tasked to offer examples and guidance on how to locally develop publicity and participation in practice. Ostensibly, the former was met with resistance while the latter, Sartorio writes, enjoyed a flurry of activity around the definition and practice of the new concept.

Critics of the Skeffington Report didn’t like the overemphasis on ‘educating the public’ through publicity. Sociologist Seán Damer and planner Cliff Hague criticised the report’s proposed format for public participation which concentrated on educating the public into the planners’ perspective of environmental matters. In their view, the proposals offered “a system of publicity which purports to tell the public all that is going on without letting it make any real contribution to policy formation.” ⁵ The sentiment captured a decisive moment in planning in which publicity and participation split ways. Following the 1947 Planning Act, public participation becomes the new darling of planners and proponents of the model of involving rather than informing in policymaking, while publicity, the education model, falls to the wayside. ⁶ After the participation turn away from publicity and public education, by the new millennium, there was little awareness of what was happening behind the doors of City Hall. It would lead to the tricky spot the London Plan now occupies of public obscurity while asking for public input. How do you comment on something you don’t know exists?

The 1943 County of London Plan by Patrick Abercrombie and John Forshaw was a seminal moment in UK planning. It was simultaneously one of the most publicly accessible and widely distributed planning documents, elaborately staged town planning exhibitions, and memorable post-war educational documentary film. It marked a time when planning was highest in public consciousness because of the need to rebuild. A richly illustrated, large-format hardcover and clothbound book of 188 pages and 59 plates, the printed County of London Plan (Macmillan 1943) is indeed remarkable as noted in a book review in ‘Nature’. It was highly praised by the reviewer for representing the future of London “so ably and in so popular a format, ahead of Moscow and New York, and maybe only comparable to Amsterdam.” While other prominent contemporaneous plans were heavily text-based and rhetoric-leaning, the County Plan worked with a visual strategy. ⁷ Visual representations in the form of drawings and photographed models were effectively used to communicate London’s new bright future.

The plan came about at a unique time in Britain and London’s print history when creative publishing was instrumentalised for wartime efforts by the Ministry of Information (MOI), the UK’s central government department created during the First World War and revived in the Second, responsible for publicity and propaganda. ⁸ Katherine Howells, researcher at the National Archives, described the work of the MOI as responsible for producing publicity material to inform the British public about the war and to maintain morale. Through experimentation with publishing pamphlets, the Ministry importantly provided people with detailed information about the events of the war, in order to satisfy their interest and maintain a level of public trust in government. ⁹

The plan was popular. Despite acute paper shortage related to the wartime efforts, over ten thousand copies sold across two print runs. Multiple editions, with changes made to format and content, widened the plan’s reach and increased its overall popularity. By the count of historians John Boughton and Frank Mort and planners Robert Freestone and Marco Amati, this included booklet versions sent to schoolchildren and British troops as part of custom education packs of drawings, photographs, and lantern slides for use in talks and discussions; a popular abridged edition published by Penguin; ⊕ Edward Carter and Erno Goldfinger’s abridged Penguin version of the County of London Plan (1943) and a special handout tailored for the national and international presses, with a copy of the plan additionally sent to the heads of planning agencies in cities such as New York, Moscow and Stockholm, as well as Amsterdam and other cities under German occupation. ^{10 11 12} For more detail, see County of London Plan Exhibition, September–October 1943, London Metropolitan Archives,CL/TP/1/44. Boughton writes, the plan reached as far as the Stalag Luft III camp in Sagan, then in Germany, where a lecture on the County of London Plan, advertised as an illustrated explanation by the Town Planning Group, was given to British prisoners of war. ¹³ ⊕ Ad poster for a lecture at Stalag Luft III, Sagan, Germany. source: John Boughton, municipaldreams.wordpress.com

Abercrombie and Forshaw mounted a public exhibition in two London venues between July and November 1943, first in County Hall in London’s South Bank and then moving to the Royal Academy in Piccadilly. ⊕ Leaflet for Exhibition of the County of London Plan at County Hall, Westminster. 14 July – 14 August 1943. Single sheet 31 x 50 cm. Folded and printed on both sides. (source: Abe Books) Throughout July and August of the first run, close to 55,000 people attended, including national political figures and a high profile visit by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. ⊕ King George VI and Queen Elizabeth with Sir Patrick Abercrombie and J. H. Forshaw at an exhibition for the County of London Plan at County Hall (1943) Source: municipaldreams.wordpress.com. The second showing, though smaller, still had a substantial turnout of nearly 22,000 people. Much of this high attendance came about from the publicity campaign backing the exhibition. It was a coordinated effort between London County Council (LCC) and London Press Exchange with Civil Defence establishments and the 28 councils granting permission to advertise exhibition posters in front of bomb sites and in air raid shelters, where Londoners were spending their time, to “give [the plan] added power and poignancy.” ¹⁴

A series of talks were given throughout benefitting the public with discussions from notable figures in planning. With models illustrating redevelopment intentions, the exhibition amplified the messages of the plan and furthered its capital-wide civic education programme. While the printed plans entered different households and were distributed to various institutional and international settings, the exhibitions worked to bring Londoners together. In Freestone and Amati’s exploration of exhibition as a lens for planning history, they noted the importance of the Exhibition as “a high water mark in the culture of twentieth-century town planning promotion generally and exhibition culture specifically.” ¹⁵

The County of London Plan’s popular reception can be credited with “the way the plan enshrined aspirations for the reconstruction of London through a range of visual media”, with film playing another prominent role. ¹⁶ As with exhibitions, urban-focused documentaries formed part of Britain’s post-war program to stimulate planning discussions and used popular media for entertaining and informative civic education, Hannah Lewi writes about plans on film. ¹⁷ The Proud City, a Plan for London (1945), is a 24-minute film produced for the Ministry of Information. ⊕ Green Park Production in association with the Film Producers Guild for the Ministry of Information, directed by Ralph Keene (1945) Proud City. It documents and visualises the impetus and intentions of the 1943 plan as well as the 1944 Greater London Plan, also by Abercrombie.

Historian Leo Enticknap notes that Abercrombie was a keen advocate of the public-service imperative of cinema and its role in education and public information, and also makes appearances in several other planning films in the 1940s. ¹⁸ Using the LCC’s Architect’s Department office as the main setting, much of the live action of Proud City sees Abercrombie and Forshaw explain the plan’s principles against the backdrop of others hard at work on realising the plan, painstakingly poring over or consulting charts, diagrams and maps. Gold and Ward writes, “the film presents planning as a scientific, rational and empirically based process” at the same time it infers the lead figures to be gifted individuals leading the team, the heroes of the plan. ¹⁹

Introduced as the ‘world famous British authority on town planning,’ Abercrombie emerges as a looming protagonist, with his monocled and bow-tied dress and paternalistic, professional persona hovering next to the more subdued Forshaw as they examine a map of London hanging on the wall. ²⁰ They both speak directly to the camera, to the viewer, as they make their expert case for their ‘blueprints’ for the future. The outcome was a representation of the plan as trustworthy with the effective use of moving image to increase understanding of the plan’s intentions. In a review of Proud City by the British Film Institute’s periodical, the Monthly Film Bulletin, it was praised for its educational merit and usefulness for youth clubs and senior forms at schools. ²¹

When we consider the 1943 County of London Plan and its heightened public visibility, the ways in which its ideas moved, through publication, exhibition, and film, it is clear the LCC, its leader Lord Latham and the architect-planners Abercrombie and Forshaw made significant civic gestures to stimulate public interest in the post-war planning of London, to educate public opinion toward their project of rebuilding London’s future. The plan was not fixed to one shape or size. Through various means of dissemination and repackaging for different uses, its ideas travelled beyond the political and professional realms of the plan authors. With the wide berth of the LCC and the MOI’s publishing and communication practices, the plan resonated back then with Londoners, not only because of wartime imperative to rebuild but also, because of the multi-pronged ways in which the dissemination and circulation of its ideas seeped into the everyday lives of Londoners.

With its evocative images, the County of London Plan is embedded in the visual vocabulary of every architect, planner, and historian working in London or studying its story 20th-century onwards. The book and its companion print material are looked on nowadays with nostalgia and held up as example by some GLA officers for how planning publications should be, in which ‘the bubble plan’ is often referenced. ^{22 23} ⊕ ‘The bubble plan’ in the County of London Plan (1943). Image source: Dick Cole. The plan was cited as a favourite of architect-planner Dick Cole of the Urban Design Group for planners. The continuing interest in London’s post-war replanning was highlighted by geographer Peter Larkham in his 2015 lecture at Gersham College. ²⁴ Proud City is also regularly screened in talks on London for professional and general film audiences, and was featured alongside a discussion of the exhibition in 2018 during the County of London Plan: 75 Years On conference held at the London Metropolitan Archives, including graphic designer Rebecca Ross’s talk on representation of the plan. ²⁵ Special thanks to Rebecca Ross for her insights on the communication of the County Plan, which has greatly informed the discussion here about its impact. GLA officers had also participated in the conference’s end of day discussion and reinforced the County Plan’s legacy link to contemporary debates about London-wide planning. Yet, despite the historical success of the publicity campaign, it marked the last time publicity in planning was held in such high regard.

When the Greater London Authority was created at the start of the millennium, it introduced a brand new government structure after “a 14-year power vacuum in the city.” ²⁶ Recognising London’s increasing strategic importance and financial competitiveness, and at the urging of London businesses represented through London First, Tony Blair’s Labour government established the GLA as an authority with city-wide functions over the 32 boroughs, plus the City of London, to ensure London’s robust development and its continuing market competitiveness. ²⁷ The re-establishment of a new London-wide authority, planner Duncan Bowie describes, was primarily in response to the business needs of a world city, given its role as a European and world financial centre that required some form of regional advocacy in order to compete with the likes of New York, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo and Moscow who already had Mayors. ²⁸

As summarised in Chapter 1 referencing the writings of Syrett (2006), Travers and Gordon (2010) and Hatherley (2020), the new governance structure was consequential. This additional tier of government gives the directly elected Mayor of London statutory power to impose metropolitan policy, a significant move because it introduced a regional tier that doesn’t exist elsewhere in England where only the local authority is directly responsible for planning. In London that power was shifted to the Mayor and shared with the boroughs, although the caveat was that funding of services stayed with central government. ²⁹ Effectively, this arrangement wedged the GLA firmly between top and bottom, resulting in limited agency reliant on asking for money to implement policies. ³⁰ Because the mayoralty of London offers a powerful platform but relatively weak powers, ie not enough financial muscle, London Mayors have had to get creative about what they can do with their restricted powers. The London Plan, as the primary policy document of mayoral duty, has strategic importance not only in terms of spatial development but in leveraging more purchasing power: cash-strapped mayors must rely on the market and on making London attractive to get the money needed to push through their policy agendas and make their visions for the capital a reality. It has led London Mayors to become London marketers. The London Plan, in as much as it is a planning tool, is also instrumentally symbolic and aspirational, in many ways the centre piece of an elaborate publicity campaign to market the London market.

As such, the plans have been driven by mayoral visions that all centre in some way on London’s global attractiveness. Travers (2004), Holman (2010), Worthy and Bennister (2017) have written about the London Plan in the context of the document’s history as a mayoral vision. Gordon (2003) and Gordon and Travers (2010) have described a lobbying function of the plan: the document is a starting point to identify need and negotiate for more money with central government for more resources for transport, housing and other assets—a way for the Mayor to explain his views about policy and ‘advertise’ them to central government. ³¹ By sociologists Fran Tonkiss and Jamie Keddie’s account, the plan further serves to promote and advertise the city in order to attract private development, orienting urban policy towards the market to drive private investment for public welfare. ³²

Significant scholarship has been written about the market forces pressing upon the London Plan and how each Mayor has responded. The following expands understanding of the plan itself as a marketing document—as part of larger publicity efforts to brand London. The opening section of the Livingstone edition is entitled, ‘My vision for London’, setting an example for Mayors Johnson and Khan to introduce the London Plan as ‘my vision for London’ in the forewords of their respective plans. But while each plan iteration reflects the individual personality of the mayors and expresses their particular vision for the city, a marketing imperative and the tendrils of the global city rhetoric run ever-present throughout all the London Plans. Because of key historical milestones that have marked the evolution of the GLA throughout its twenty-year history, marketing London, in service of the global city, has been the necessary work of every Mayor of London.

Journalist Jim Edwards had posed this rhetorical question in a feature article on Ken Livingstone printed in Brandweek magazine, previously a weekly American marketing trade publication, after the then Mayor of London was lauded as one of the 2006 Marketers of the Year by the Association of National Advertisers. Brandweek is now a three-day marketing symposium after it was folded into Adweek publication in 2011. Livingstone was recognised for elevating the status of London as a “world-class destination” following on from his revitalisation of the capital’s tourism through the Visit London campaign and the successful bid in July 2005 for the 2012 London Olympics, beating out Paris and New York for the honour. After a series of economic setbacks associated with giant developments like the Millennium Dome at the end of the century and Wembley Stadium at the start of the new one, in addition to the sunken number of overseas visitors after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the article describes, London had hit rock bottom as a tourist destination and a brand. ³³

Edwards attributed London’s renaissance in large part to Livingstone for helping to turn the city’s image (and fortune) around, calling him its “top cheerleader” who was able to “harness the city’s wealth, power, culture and vision as its de facto CEO.” The analogy of London’s first directly elected Mayor being the city’s Chief Executive Officer is telling of how the GLA runs like a corporation. In an American publication catering to mostly American capitalists, the significance of the international recognition is that corporate marketing spearheaded by the Mayor was critical to London’s rise in ‘global city’ standing and to communicating such status. Duncan Bowie further suggests, through aggressive campaigning, Livingstone played a major role in “London’s return to the world stage” at the beginning of the twenty-first century. ³⁴ Livingstone’s efforts had links to New Labour’s ‘Cool Britannia’ campaign in the mid-late 1990s and a larger attempt to rebrand Britain as “modern, young, and diverse.” ³⁵

According to communications scholar Charlotte Werther, political leaders pursued nation branding to address concerns about British identity, seen by the UK cross-party think tank Demos in a 1997 report as in flux and Britain’s image around the world as “stuck in the past.” ³⁶ In her study of Britain’s rebranding, she summarised that the term ‘nation brand’ was first used by branding consultant Simon Arnolt to mean a certain image an international audience has of a county, whereas ‘nation branding’ is, problematically, the attempt at a “quick fix of a weak or negative image.” ³⁷ Anholt was also a member of the U.K. Foreign Office Public Diplomacy Board. Arnolt had proposed an alternative term, ‘competitive identity,’ a way for nations, cities, and regions to brand manage to stay internationally competitive. According to marketing scholar Ying Fan’s revised definition, ³⁸

There were very good reasons for Livingstone to engage in nation-city branding for London, on behalf of Britain, to fix its image. The GLA had come into being at a historic moment. A year after he took office in May 2000, the September 11 terrorist attack happened in New York that would hamstring global tourism and adversely impact world cities like London who rely on it. Post 2001 terrorism, plus the foot-and-mouth disease and a general economic slowdown, the capital struggled to draw in visitors, which dropped by 10% and cost London £1.1 billion, according to Paul Hopper, the Managing Director of the London Tourist Board and Convention Bureau, writing in 2002 on marketing London in a difficult climate. ³⁹

Needing to actively market the city as a world-class destination, Edwards describes, Livingstone bolstered the then-anemic tourism authority, Visit London (formerly London Tourist Board), with 75 new hires and a £10 million budget, and tasked the agencies commissioned as part of the Mayor of London’s Tourism Recovery Plan to promote a more contemporary image of London. With the help of AMV BBDO, the UK’s biggest ad agency, the Mayor and Visit London launched a major campaign in 2002, Totally London, to offset the effects of the recent downturn in tourism and to “lure wary tourists back to the capital”. ⁴⁰ Mayor Livingstone’s then website described it as a major tourism recovery campaign targeting Londoners, people from the rest of the UK and Europe. ⁴¹ Like New York’s iconic ‘I Love NY’ brand and slogan designed by Milton Glaser in 1976, the advertising promoted tourism by widely circulating an image that instilled a city identity, using London street signs and typography to boost interest in the city’s museums, retail outlets, parks and other offers. The brand was a fixture on buses and in the street.

Totally London was jointly funded by the private sector and the Mayor’s London Development Agency (LDA), a regional development agency that was a functional body of the GLA from 2000 until LDA’s close in 2012. Visit London was headed by Tamara Ingram, who was also the UK chief executive of Grey, another global advertising agency. She was the first ad agency professional to lead London’s international marketing, bringing communications expertise to the city and working collaboratively with the Mayor, the LDA, and the London Assembly. ⁴² Combining marketing, advertising and PR initiatives, Ingram describes, the campaign took an integrated approach to promoting the city and connected transport, theatre, retail, museums and built a programme around all of them that had not been done before.

The campaign was a success. Over a million Londoners took part in Totally London Month, a month of discounts to the city’s best offerings, including the Totally London Tour promoting cultural events and festivals and the Get into London Theatre campaign promoting theatre attendance. ⁴³ By 2003, overseas tourist numbers inched upward, and by 2004 and 2005, overseas tourist visits increased beating pre-9/11 record. The promotion of Visit London and Totally London ran for over ten years, prominent among a trend of city branding of other world cities over the same decade. Other notable campaigns included I Am Amsterdam (2004) and the City of Melbourne’s new identity system (2009) designed by Landor.

Livingstone also co-led the 2012 Olympics Games winning bid for which he set aside his differences with Prime Minister Blair to work together for “the chance to host the world’s most important special, sporting event here in the world’s greatest capital city.” ⁴⁴ In a 2003 Guardian op-ed, Livingstone made the case for London’s bid by tying the capital’s “go for gold” ambition to a net gain for the rest of Britain, arguing that it would give the UK tourism industry a needed shot in the arm, an economic gift which would benefit the whole country and also bring local change through East London’s regeneration. For him, “the Games represent a unique opportunity to combine the transformation of the East End’s economy and physical environment with the transformation of the city’s, and even the nation’s social capital.” ⁴⁵ In other promotions, Livingstone and the bid team touched on the “world-class” and “world-famous” qualities of London as the right choice for host, a standing that was intended to be reflected in the logo for the candidate city, which featured a multi-coloured ribbon (the five Olympic colours) flowing through the words ‘London 2012’. ⊕ Logo of the 2012 London Olympic Bid designed by Kino. Image source: Wikipedia Andy Stanfield of Kino Design, who came up with the bid logo, explains the graphic design choice, ⁴⁶

After the Games was secured, the controversial Wolff Olins-designed official London 2012 logo was seen positively by organiser Tess Jowell as “an iconic brand that sums up what London 2012 is all about – an inclusive, welcoming and diverse Games that involves the whole country,” and Livingstone as a “brand [that] draws on what London has become – the world’s most forward-looking and international city.” ⁴⁷ ⊕ Logo designed by Wolff Olins. Source: Wikipedia The jagged emblem does visually communicate a certain dynamism, however, it’s debatable whether there is anything world-related, international or inclusive about the design. Rather, the rhetoric suggests political leaders’ projection of a desired image and identity of the city (and country).

All of this world-ness and emphasis on diversity directly connects with Livingstone’s approach to the London Plan. In an analysis of the changing nature of the London Plan, planner Nancy Holman described Livingstone’s 2004 London Plan as “partly a strategic spatial plan and partly the mayor’s personal vision for London’s development,” and further asserts that it “was clearly a document written to emphasise London’s place on the world stage.” ⁴⁸ Livingstone embraced London’s world city role and, according to Tonkiss and Keddie, oriented London “to growth in both economic and population terms: building on its world city status as the nation’s economic engine, and as a city that was once again—after a long post-war demographic decline—attracting new residents.” ⁴⁹ According to Gordon and Travers, the London Plan was, without question, used by the first Mayor to describe his vision for London. ⁵⁰ To execute his vision “to develop London as an exemplary, sustainable world city,” Livingstone’s plan shifted development eastward, away from the west to drive physical and social renewal in east London and other ‘areas for regeneration’ identified as “deprived.” ⁵¹ Policy 2A.4 Areas for Regeneration mapped ‘areas for regeneration’ based on The London Index of Deprivation (GLA 2002). Deprivation is defined relative to exclusion from or deficiency in work, education, health and housing.

His plan was not only strategic for the development of inner London, but inner London was strategic for the plan, bringing the world in through Olympic Games investment. Securing an Olympics in east London, modelled on the experience of Barcelona, urban scholar Juliet Davis writes on the role of megaevents, had been key to support the plan’s objectives of regeneration and growth for the area, and to mobilise public funding and stimulate market-led urban change. ⁵² East London was also opportunistic for Livingstone to promote the city’s postcolonial ‘cosmopolitan allure’ through the ethnic and cultural diversity of Newham, the event site. ⁵³ In an analysis of London’s bid—the relationship between the governance of London and self-representation of the city—by Peter Newman, environmental scientist and writer on urban planning and sustainability, Livingstone’s selling of multiculturalism helped to secure the win. ⁵⁴

For Livingstone’s efforts behind the Olympics bid and the Visit London initiatives, underpinned by the London Plan’s world orienting, he received the Brandweek award and was honoured at the annual conference of the Association of National Advertisers which “celebrat[es] the industry’s top marketers, who have best used creativity and instinct to break through with national brands.” Among the other honourees were executives of Toyota, Wal-Mart, and Disney. ⁵⁵ London’s international branding under his stewardship paved the way not only for how London is marketed but it inaugurated the Mayor’s role as the city’s chief cheerleader and marketer. While Livingstone joked the award was for being “Mouth of the Year”, significantly, the marketing-savvy mayor and his PR machine set a precedent for marketing London, how and what messages get out. On the heels of New Labour’s short-lived ‘Cool Britannia’ moment in the 1990s, his nation-city rebranding would come to bear on the approaches of future Mayors and on the London Plan, further cementing in place an advertising, brand-conscious lens through which Londoners and the world sees the capital.

Not everyone was happy with Livingstone’s PR focus. In a 2003 Campaign article, Livingstone accused of pushing self in ads, the mayor came under fire from his political rivals accusing him of wasting money on expensive ad campaigns. ⁵⁶ His critics claimed the GLA had spent £18.5 million in the year to the end of August 2003, an annual ad spend in line with major advertisers such as NatWest, to self-promote for the upcoming 2004 election—“spending vast sums plastering his face all over London”—rather than what the GLA had insisted had gone to public information activity for TfL. Then in 2008, Boris Johnson, Conservative candidate for London Mayor, outright criticised Mayor Livingstone’s “extravagant spending on publicity”, in a mayoral campaign publication called Making London’s Mayor More Accountable. ⁵⁷

But once Johnson took office, he faced a looming recession brought on by the global financial crisis of 2008 and would too be compelled to leverage marketing and branding London for the city’s recovery. In response to the publication of the Wigley financial report, ‘London, Winning in the Decade Ahead,’ “which warned that London risked losing its position as financial capital of the world,” Johnson put forth his own economic recovery action plan. ⁵⁸ In June 2009, he established Promote London Council (PLC) to help “maximise the impact of the capital’s marketing expenditure” and develop a “comprehensive approach to promoting the capital and establishing a brand for London.” ⁵⁹ Out of that same Wigley report came TheCityUK in 2010, established as the premier financial services promotional body to represent the broad spectrum of sectors across the financial and related professional services industry to sustain London’s reputation as a global capital of finance whose remit covered the promotion of the UK as a world-leading international financial centre at home and overseas. PLC brought together all the key promotional agencies for London. As Chair, the Mayor oversaw actions to “ensure London’s marketing is strategic and integrated.” The 25-person group was consulted on “how London’s public relations could be better organised and on work to develop a brand for London.” ⁶⁰ In the foreword of the London Tourism Action Plan 2009-13 published by the London Development Agency, Johnson described PLC as “a more comprehensive and joined up approach to marketing the capital, particularly in the run-up to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.” ⁶¹

A key theme of his London Tourism Vision identified in the document was reasserting London’s position as a global city, carrying forward similar ambitions identified in Livingstone’s mayoralty as part of an extensive consultation process in late 2005, a ten-year vision for tourism in London. Tourism being a key driver of London’s wider economy, the Mayor, LDA and PLC coordinated efforts to increase targeted marketing activity. Two years after his criticism about Livingstone’s PR strategy, Johnson, likewise, sought to fix (manage) the city’s image.

He opened the GLA’s wallet to spend money to rebrand London, albeit with a more budget conscious £500,000 project (of a bigger £1 million tourism campaign, thrifty in comparison to Livingstone’s £10 million) that rolled out the plain sans-serif typeface introduced by Visit London in 2008 and created by Saffron Brand Consultants. The rebranding was part of a major tourism push to mark the capital’s official transition to Olympic host city, which launched its first global ad campaign using the line, ‘See the world. Visit London’. ⁶² Created by RKCR/Y&R London advertising agency, the print ads placed London literally at the centre of the world, with the outline of the Thames river placed in front of a globe. In other variants of the poster, the river is overlaid on fireworks (“a world of celebrations”) to promote the Mayor’s Thames Festival and the London Design Festival, and on a microphone (“a world of music”) to promote Riverfront Jazz Festival and Bankside Night. These were featured prominently in London Underground and on London buses and streets.

The 2010 rebranding, called ‘One city – One voice,’ was commissioned by Promote London Council, which later became London & Partners in 2011, the Mayor’s official business trade and promotional agency “whose mission is to tell London’s story brilliantly to an international audience,” and whose role is to promote London internationally as a leading world city. ^{63 64} London & Partners undertook the work previously carried out by Think London, Visit London, Study London and Film London targeting potential investors, tourists, students and filmmakers, consolidated into “a single coherent voice.” ⁶⁵ Urbanist Greg Clark in his book, The Making of a World City, writes of the new integrated platform for marketing and promotion in a positive light, successful to have secured private funding from over 300 private sector partners and “benefit from a highly active business community whose expertise has been regularised and institutionalised.” ⁶⁶ But having a single (regularised and institutionalised) coherent voice contradicts political goals to promote London’s world city multi-culturalism and is against stated claims of diversity.

According to Saffron’s website about the One city – One Voice project, “rocked by the [2008] financial crisis, security threats and even street riots, London needed a concerted effort to bounce back and regain its confidence as the world’s leading global city.” ⁶⁷ In the description of the project brief and their design work, the goal was to create a branding platform “that would enable them to raise the city’s profile globally” with activities and messaging “consistent enough to build and project a strong brand for London,” such that the brand is “the public face of the city.”

The Mayor’s director of marketing Dan Ritterband noted the re-branding “provided an opportunity to ‘tidy up’ communications and create a coherent message that mirrored the success of New York’s ‘NYC’ branding. The original brief […] said the Mayor’s Office was looking for a marque which represented the diversity of the capital.” ⁶⁸ Prior to this, according to Johnson Banks, a branding consultancy agency, the brand identities of various London organisations had been disparate and independent of one another. Adopting the same livery, “a coherent, strong, central brand,” would allow London to continue to compete with New York in the world city aspirations. ⁶⁹ Similar rhetoric was present in the execution of the Olympics’ branding across the city in the lead up to the Games. Ritterband was interviewed by CNN about floating the Olympic rings on the Thames, what organisers call an “iconic spectacular” and described excitedly by the US reporter as part of “a series of projects to get the capital dressed for the Olympics this summer, a show fit for a global audience.” ⁷⁰

The language used by London & Partners, Saffron, Clark, Ritterbrand and others, based in ideas of coherency, centrality, tidiness, and proper dress, suggests they see the opposite as true, that London’s image needs cleaning up because it is incoherent, fragmented, untidy and improper looking. It is reminiscent of the language of urban ‘decline’ that’s been controversially used by officials to rationalise and drive modern-day ‘regeneration’ of London, in order to address perceived ‘degradation’ and cleanse the city and neighbourhoods of their seeming (undesired) grit and dirt, which architectural and urbanism historian Ben Campkin has written about. ⁷¹

Johnson’s international ambition for the city culminated in the publication 2020 Vision: The Greatest City on Earth, Ambitions for London by Boris Johnson. Produced in 2013 on the tailwind of the success of the 2012 Olympics Games, the document “set out the steps London needs to be taking between now and 2020, so that the British capital is the envy of the world in 2050 and beyond.” ⁷² ⊕ Greater London Authority (2013) 2020 Vision: The Greatest City on Earth. The purpose of the document was to “explain the agenda for London, so that we can make our case to government and to the world.” Capitalising on London’s raised international profile post-Olympics, it served as “a prospectus for investors from around the world,” and as “a route map and a manifesto” to give government a clear idea of how investment in London can help drive the rest of the UK economy, in order to fulfil a desire “to lengthen the current (and necessarily precarious) lead of London as the financial, commercial, cultural, artistic, media, educational, scientific and innovation capital of the world.”

Holman has suggested that, while Livingstone’s London Plan had “left no doubt as to the central role of the Mayor, and unabashedly presented his own personal vision for the capital” through a “singular view of pursuing and maintaining world city status,” Boris Johnson had a more diffuse set of aims and a less myopic vision, a plan “not particularly driven by a vision of how London as a whole should develop in the future or market itself to the outside world.” ⁷³ Where Livingstone’s plan was precise and prescriptive, Holman writes, Johnson’s plan was more a high-level vision that “London should excel among global cities,” with less clear directions and looser policies on how to achieve it. This more notional, decentralised approach led to, Holman and Thornley contend, a ‘reversal’ and loss of strategic planning. ⁷⁴

In contradiction, although Johnson was more hands-off than his predecessor about policy execution, he does see his plan as “a keystone in realising my vision for London as the best big city in the world,” as noted in the foreword of London Plan 2011 where he puts his own spin on London’s world city status. ⁷⁵ Despite an absence of specificity, his plan was still a vision for London that embraced two significant objectives, “London must retain and build upon its world city status as one of three business centres of global reach […] London must also be among the best cities in the world to live, whatever your age or background.” ⁷⁶ There is a conflict between his version of world city found in the agenda of the 2020 Vision against the type of de-centring found in the rhetoric of his London Plan 2011. He wanted to realise the full development potential of the capital, spoken in terms of “economic dynamism” and “world-beating innovation” in the face of global challenges, but had no plan strategy to achieve it.

Instead, diverging from Livingstone’s pursuit of a global city economic agenda for London through the social lens of a world city rhetoric, Johnson relied largely on external global-oriented marketing activities. Under Johnson, the importance of partnerships with the private sector grew as part of a broader strategic marketing of the city, steered by London & Partners. So, while a straighter line can be drawn between the London Plan and world-city chest-thumping during Livingstone’s time, in Johnson’s, that line bended like the sinuous Thames River in the See the World posters. Rather than a strategic focus in his plan to realise his vision for London to be ‘the greatest city on earth,’ efforts meandered toward marketing pitches.

Politics scholars Ben Worthy and Mark Bennister (2017) have reflected on how the first two mayors necessarily “used publicity to make up for weak powers,” characterising Livingstone and Johnson as “colourful individuals who were controversial, party rebels, mavericks, and skilled political operators with highly attuned media skills and presence.” ⁷⁷ Livingstone is described as having “perfected the art of populist showmanship” and being focused on the minutiae of policy in London planning, by contrast, Johnson left the details to his deputies and concentrated more on “showy ideas” and “photo ops.” Johnson’s attention was on initiatives like ‘Boris Bikes’ and the new Routemaster (Borismaster) bus, part of the “selling of the city.” ⁷⁸ When not putting his name on things, he was busy with making aesthetic changes to architectural style through a Design Guide to create a “New London Vernacular,” which journalist Owen Hatherley panned a re-cladding job considerably less interesting than the real London vernacular. ⁷⁹ Also notably, Boris Bikes was simply a renaming of Livingstone’s plan for a hire bicycle scheme.

By the time Sadiq Khan’s London Plan version was published in 2021, the term ‘world city’ no longer explicitly appears in the Mayor’s foreword as it did in Livingstone’s and Johnson’s. References to ‘world city’ are overall sparser in Khan’s plan (mentioned 5 times) and not as upfront and centre as they more frequently appear in the editions of Livingstone (32 times) and Johnson (28 times). ‘Global city’ is mentioned in the policy text in Khan’s promotion of “London as a 24-hour global city,” interestingly, part of the chapter on heritage and culture and not the one on economy. ⁸⁰ London’s global city standing, relative to financial performance, is rather outwardly expressed in the external business partnerships the Mayor continued to actively pursue to sustain the city’s growth.

While both his predecessors heavily courted the press, Mayor Khan, in comparison, is less headline-grabbing but he too needed to be sophisticated and nimble in leveraging media to London’s benefit in light of unexpected outside pressures putting the capital’s development at risk. Where the Livingstone and Johnson mayoralties were marked by their responses to the Olympics, tourism and the economic challenges post-9/11 and 2008 financial crisis, Khan’s mayoralty had Brexit, the 2016 vote for the UK’s exit from the European Union, and then the global economy-halting coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, to contend with.

One month after Khan’s election, the European Union referendum took place in June in which 60% of Londoners voted for Remain while 52% of the UK as a whole voted for Leave. ⁸¹ In response to the referendum outcome, the #LondonIsOpen campaign was launched in July to “show that London is united and open for business [and] remains entrepreneurial, international and full of creativity and possibility,” reassuring Londoners, Europe and elsewhere globally that London was still welcoming to all. ⁸² Khan along with leading industry creatives, including Turner Prize nominee artist David Shrigley, communicated “the simple but vital message that despite uncertainties around Brexit, London will remain an international city.” ⁸³ The message was in line with Khan’s mayoral candidate platform of ‘a city for all’, and advocated a togetherness, “that despite Brexit, London will always be open to the world, proud of our diversity and inclusive to everyone,” an openness that previewed the spirit of his draft London Plan. ⁸⁴ ⊕ Poster with artwork by David Shrigley for Mayor of London’s #LondonIsOpen campaign for Tube. Photograph: Thierry Bal ⊕ The posters and promotional video are part of the #LondonIsOpen campaign produced by the Mayor of London in 2016 to address Brexit anxiety. The video shows that #London is open and always will be, through a series of vignettes of Londoners opening the doors of London businesses. It features shops with specialty offerings from different European countries, part of the Mayor “getting the message out loud and clear around the world that despite Brexit, London remains open to the world.”

The Khan plan is both a continuation and a departure from the previous two plans. It continues the pro-development theme, but not just growth at any cost. It is particularly concerned with “good growth,” which has been defined as development that promotes and delivers a better, more inclusive form of growth on behalf of all Londoners, leading to a more socially integrated and sustainable city. The plan is set as “a policy framework to deliver good growth through good design,” and supported by the Designing a City for All, Good Growth programme and amplified by the Mayor’s Design Advocates. ⁸⁵ ⊕ Mayor of London (2020) Designing a City for All Londoners. For the first time, different from previous London Plans, there is a chapter dedicated wholly to (environmental) design.

Previously, Livingstone’s plan had a specific design direction tied to his “powerful commitment to compact city planning,” Richard Rogers’ urban design model, describes urban designer Peter Bishop in his book on Design for London, whereas, the role of design was less clear and sometimes faced a hostile environment during Johnson’s mayoralty. ⁸⁶ In Khan’s plan, the focus on design returns but rather than prescriptive technical standards, architects and urban designers are now given greater flexibility to take a ‘design-led approach’ to determine “the most appropriate form and land use for a site.” ⁸⁷ Despite the policy change, Khan would use ‘good design’ as a marketing tool and follow in Livingstone and Johnson’s footsteps to direct marketing efforts at pressuring private industries to help finance delivery of his plan.

For example, the #LondonIsOpen campaign was supported and promoted by London & Partners, working closely with the Mayor. As a private-public partnership funded by the Mayor of London and commercial partners focused on international trade and investment and promoting the city, London & Partners has tremendous sway not only in how London is branded, as seen in Saffron’s work in previously, but also in the direction of London’s growth. Their Strategy 2018-2021 aligns with Mayor Khan’s economic development strategy. Their “work helps to achieve ‘good growth’ for London and Londoners,” and does so by focusing on: “building London’s international reputation, attracting international audiences and convincing them to choose London, guiding international audiences to make the most of all that London has to offer, and helping to retain and grow London’s businesses.” ⁸⁸

London & Partners and representatives from London design business attended Shenzhen Design Week in April 2019 to promote London’s creative industry as part of Mayor Khan’s Good Growth programme that drives the policies of his new London Plan. ⊕ Mayor of London (2016). Good Growth Agendas. (Designed by Maddison Graphic) The international event featured London as its guest city and The London Pavilion was supported by the Mayor of London, curated by the Chartered Society of Designers (CSD) and included the participation of London & Partners and New London Architecture (NLA), the centre for London’s built environment and a prominent (pro-development) voice on the future shape of the city.

A highlight of London’s representation in Shenzhen was the film that premiered on 19 April 2019. Bringing together renowned designers and creative industry leaders as talking heads, the tightly edited, high value production video “showcases [the Mayor’s] vision for Good Growth — that all communities in London should share in the benefits of growth.” ⁸⁹ Using a tilt shift camera effect and shallow depth of field, the “film conveyed a complex strategy in a palatable narrative”, as described by the filmmakers, that featured themed-based testimonials from design experts speaking from within their studios or work environment and intercut with sleek, seductive imagery of the city. ⁹⁰ Archetype’s clients include Microsoft, Nike, and Barbican. Like it is for 400, Grey, and Saffron, the Mayor of London is just another corporate account for them. Produced by studio Archetype, the 10:15 min video projects a sense of success and desirability, with most of the exterior footage consisting of ‘successful’ (large scale and prestige value) regeneration projects and new developments, particularly Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Here East and Kings Cross area, including images of Coal Yard Drops and the University of the Arts London’s Central Saint Martins to emphasise design. In contrast, whenever there are mentions of people or London’s communities, the scenes are of markets and diverse people of colour.

It’s significant to note that the promo video was not screened at home in London but was exclusively created for a global audience: Shenzhen Design Week attendees, a mostly young, urban demographic of a new city. Over the short span of just four decades, Shenzhen has become “the modern day leading city of Southeast China” and “the Silicon Valley of China,” according to a 2019 UN-Habitat report. ⁹¹ In 2016, it was only third behind Shanghai and Beijing in contribution to China’s GDP. The event provided an opportunity for the Mayor’s surrogates, the NLA and London & Partners, to show off London for investment and to seek ways in which the UK and China design sectors might collaborate in the future. The London & Partners team also visited province of Hainan for the first time to developed partnership with Hainan government and business organisations. ⁹²

Shenzhen Design Week was a networking avenue to connect the story of London’s growth to the story of Shenzhen’s growth—from a remote, agricultural country town to a global technology centre and manufacturing powerhouse. In 1,500 sqm of convention space, exhibitors at the London Pavilion included representatives from various design sectors, in which Julian Maynard, Director & Industrial Designer of Maynard Design, in a post-event promo video by CSD, describes the participants’ contributions as, ⁹³

In the same video, Peter Murray, a Mayor of London Design Advocate, NLA co-founder and one of the featured panel speakers of London Talks to Shenzhen, directly ties the story of the city to the Mayor’s London Plan policy agenda, “the idea of Good Growth by Design is that design is a part of all policies by the mayor.” Together with his design advocates, in Shenzhen and through the #LondonIsOpen campaign, the Mayor is able to sell his plan at home and overseas to both local and global audiences.

Reaching the global market is important in the pro-growth planning environment discussed in Chapter 1. In February 2021, the London Real Estate Forum hosted an international Investment Summit. ⊕ Mayor Khan was a keynote speaker and his London Plan’s ‘Good Growth’ agenda was highlighted. In his keynote message, he reiterated the plan’s ambition for “growth that is sustainable, inclusive, and benefits all of our communities rather than just a privileged few.” ⁹⁴ While his words and vision put a social lens—not just spatial—through which growth is to be viewed, in some similarities to Livingstone, he nonetheless carries forward the torch of both his predecessors’ emphasis on growth as a key economic driver of London’s future and, in particular light of the 2019 pandemic, its recovery; “so our economy can grow, flourish and thrive once again.” Khan’s presence at the conference underscores the entanglement of growth and global rhetoric: for London to continue to grow, it must continue to be a global leader.

That these remarks were made at an international investor and real estate summit speaks to the importance of the relationship City Hall sustains with the larger, global development sector, the main promoter of the growth agenda. Events of the four-day summit included, ‘London: Driving Growth’, aimed at borough leaders to discuss growth strategies, and ‘Opportunity London’, to discuss how “to protect London’s long-term competitiveness”.

One speaker at the latter session, the CEO of London & Partners, expressed economic optimism for London’s post-Covid future because of its global city status, highlighting the organisation’s ongoing efforts in, and laser focus on, “creating jobs in ‘high growth sectors’ […] and bringing companies to London for the next stage of their global growth.” The rep spoke breathlessly of chasing after tech unicorns, the highly sought-after international start-up companies valued at over $1billion, to entice the relocation of their offices to London. This encapsulates the pro-growth and pro-global debate discussed in Chapter 1. Over the years, as the pool of public money gets smaller, attracting young, urban, tech-savvy and mobile (global) workers to London—in order to reproduce capital growth—is a priority and financial incentive for the cash-strapped GLA and local authorities.

Notably, in the background of Mayor Khan’s video message were two posters from the #LondonIsOpen campaign: one is a poster of street names around London showing the city’s historical connections with other nationalities, anchored in red by the custom sign, “London is Open” to indicate London’s streets are world streets; the other is artwork by David Shrigley, an illustration of the word ‘LONDON’ with two globes standing in place for the letters ‘O’, set above the handwritten message, “Everyone Welcome.” ⊕ New London Architecture (2021). London Real Estate Forum’s Investment Summit. Video screencaps. In the background behind Mayor Sadiq Khan are #LondonIsOpen posters with artwork by David Shrigley. The 2016 posters were originally designed to address the anxieties related to Brexit. They communicated an ongoing representation of London as a world city—a symbolic projection of the continued strength of its ethnic and cultural diversity. It was also a continuation of the ‘nation branding’ by a London Mayor that began with Livingstone, seen strikingly in his remarks at the 2005 bombing vigil, that London is where “you see the world gathered in one city, living in harmony, as an example to all.” ⁹⁵ Not only is it an example to all, implicit is the view of London as an example of all coming together, the imaginative ‘all’ (universal and harmonious) that was discussed in Chapter 2.

Beset by a different crisis but facing a similar (perceived) threat to London’s image after the Brexit vote, Khan sought to also reinforce this imagination of its world city-ness. The #LondonIsOpen campaign had initially emerged from a “urgent need” identified by London & Partners to “move quickly to start to allay fears of the future” and “to address immediate negative concerns around London remaining a welcoming city.” ⁹⁶ In their summary of the project, they noted a marketing campaign was rationalised as “essential” to launch to “prevent losing London business,” citing the “dire economic consequences for London” and concerns over “the very real risk we faced of businesses no longer seeing London as a destination for their business events, entrepreneurs and corporations no longer wanting to set up offices here, visitors no longer wanting to visit, and students no longer wanting to study here.” ⁹⁷ The campaign used ‘diversity’ to make their business case, implied in London & Partners’ description was the strategic positioning of the first Muslim mayor of London as the key figure to spearhead the campaign. ⁹⁸ He appears in promotional videos in an unsubtle reminder to the doubtful that “London is anyone” and “London is everyone,” as declared in giant stickers plastered on surfaces across public spaces in London.

Khan, like Livingstone, engaged in what feminist theorist Sara Ahmed calls ‘official diversity’ talk. She defines it as an institutional speech act, eg, “we are diverse,” stated and performed to affirm as if true, whether or not there’s any truth value to it, in which, through its circulation and repeated utterances, it gains force and currency. ⁹⁹ Ahmed describes this language of diversity as a politics of ‘yes’: “the ‘happy diversity’ model, in which ‘diversity talk’ becomes ‘happy talk,’ provides a positive, shiny image of the organisation that allows inequalities to be concealed and thus reproduced.” ¹⁰⁰ Statements like, “London is open” and “London is everyone,” spin a negative narrative of racism in Britain associated with Brexit into a positive one to match the Mayor’s political rhetoric, “London is a city for all,” the campaign manifesto upon which he was elected. The message implies that London, which voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU, is different from the rest of Britain, more welcoming, the Mayor eager to reassert and hang onto its prized distinction as “the most diverse city in the world.” Whether the statements are true is another matter.

In 2016, after first becoming Mayor, Khan had claimed “London was the most diverse city in the world,” but per a BBC Radio 4 report in rebuttal, that distinction actually, arguably, belonged to Toronto, a city in Canada with higher numbers in percentage of foreign-born residents and mix of different nationalities than London. ¹⁰¹ 51% of Torontonians were foreign-born, compared to London’s 37%. Reporter Ed Davey notes that this standard metric of a country’s diversity—as a percentage of its population that is foreign-born—is flawed. Sadiq Khan, whose mayoral election win was meant as a display of London’s diversity, was born in London and therefore would not be counted in such a diversity index (which also doesn’t account for second or third generation immigrants). In 2021, Khan tacitly recycled that claim to make another business case. He used old imagery to make a familiar sales pitch about London’s world city appeal, pivoted to sway an international audience of a reality of London’s multiculturalism that is (statistically) not entirely accurate. While the posters were meant to convey, literally, that London is open to everyone, there’s a double intent behind showing them at an international investment summit following the financial upheaval of a pandemic; London is also, and still, open for business.

This broad picture of the marketing and branding of the city as a world class destination of global city significance, and of the Mayor’s active role in international outreach, is key to understanding the market positioning of the London Plan and precisely the interplay of public and private interests. That London & Partners, a business network, and NLA, a network that brings together both developers and designers, represent the Mayor of London’s interests at home and abroad, speaks to a symbiotic relationship between the public and private sector in shared goals of changing London’s physical environment and advertising a certain image of the city. In this way, the London Plan remains inseparable from the London ‘world city’ brand. Over the GLA’s twenty-year history, through city branding and mayoral visioning, the plan has contributed to the marketing and storytelling of a sellable image of London.

Peter Bishop has noted that, compared to the ways planning was done in the UK in 1943, where land use zoning and maps were central to the vision, today’s policy focus in planning makes few really tangible proposals. ¹⁰² This changed nature of planning therefore opens the door for a marketing approach to plan-making, he suggests. To this I would add that world events since the millennium and the attendant pressures of their crises uniquely affected London’s nation brand in a way that demanded a response from each Mayor that plan-making alone could not address. With their restricted powers limiting what could be done in the immediate aftermath through strategic planning, they used the London Plan to arguably engage in strategic ‘plan marketing’ to promote the city’s resilience (against terrorism, economic instability, health and climate emergencies) and invest in nation branding to prop up London’s image perceived to be damaged. The next chapter will go into detail about how the GLA crafts that image into a corporate brand.

This chapter looked at the evolution of public relations in London strategic planning through the lens of publicity and how it has been used to tell and sell the London story. In 1943, publicity had the purpose of educating the public into the planner’s vision of a postwar London, communicated by a proactive, multi-prong public relations campaign that involved print, exhibition, and film aimed at a variety of audiences, and state-supported by the Ministry of Information. At the end of the century, publicity was no longer actively pursued to promote London’s strategic plan. MOI’s successor, the Central Office of Information, closed in 2011, in which the government “slashed unnecessary spending on communications.” ¹⁰³ Central spending on marketing from 2010 onwards fell considerably, with it, a fall in regional government news announcements as well. This lack of funding trends with the planning profession’s attention turned toward public-involving and away from information-giving in plan-making, thus, in the GLA era, publicity has been undertaken by entrepreneurial mayors in other ways to get buy-in for their visions of London’s future.

Setbacks to London’s tourism, economy, health and sustainability from historic global events during each mayoralty have compelled the three Mayors to rely on branding and marketing to elevate or reaffirm the capital’s ‘world-city’ status as a place of desired diversity and its global position as an important financial centre. The mayors took to marketing the London brand and advertising the capital’s global attractiveness to visitors and investors, an external international audience as well as an internal local audience alike. A series of targeted campaigns aimed to secure and sustain London’s international standing. The London Plan, a policy extension of those efforts, is as much about telling the story of London as it is about selling the future of London, in which a ‘global city’ thread runs throughout the narrative.

Such messaging with a global city framing is an important context to understand the London Plan’s communication ecosystem. The plan advertises to central government and is used by Mayors to negotiate for more fiscal power, but it is also a key advertising piece of a complicated marketing puzzle to simultaneously sell London to Londoners and to a ‘global elite’. The London Plan has been used by Mayor Livingstone as an investment prospectus to get more money from central government and by Mayor Johnson alongside his 2020 vision to attract investors from around the world. It is used by Mayor Khan to promote London’s inclusivity and openness for business in a post-Brexit and post-pandemic world. The combined message is: The world’s greatest capital city on Earth. See the World. Visit London. Open to all.

Khan has talked about how his plan “combines a purpose and a vision” and how its integrated policies are “helping to deliver my wider vision for our city” and “to build a city that works for all Londoners”. ¹⁰⁴ What the above makes clear is that the purpose of the London Plan is to be a strategic marketing document. The next chapter, Publication, furthers this point by examining in detail the publishing practices of the Mayor, the GLA, and other plan-makers and plan-commenters, and the role that data and evidence plays in their production of documents. It highlights the conflicts inherent to the GLA’s operation as a corporation and a public institution.