There have been three London Mayors and three substantive versions of the London Plan, 2004, 2011 and 2021. While mayoral visions have differed plan to plan, remarkably, the form and format of the plan has not substantially changed since the first publication. The covers across editions are different, as is each plan’s content, but in relative terms of text and graphical presentation, there is little differentiation between the outputs of Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson, and Sadiq Khan. When Johnson’s plan was published in 2011, his team hailed it for being shorter and more focussed (317 pages versus 491 pages, 121 policies versus 204 policies), lighter (1.2 kg v 2.1 kg) and more user friendly than Livingstone’s plan. ¹ The page trim arguably reflects the Conservatives’ austerity measures post-2008 financial crisis and their goals of cutting red tape for economic efficiency, more so than a graphic design feat. With Khan’s iteration, at 524 pages and 2 kg, the page count and weight are on the upswing again, attributable possibly to the amount of additional text space needed to explain what was described as “a break from previous plans” and “a new way of doing things.” ² All else, document design and format wise, however, is not new and remains much the same with little visual differentiation.

Like its forerunners, the London Plan 2021 is an A4 size document, 210mm x 297mm. It is accessible online and downloadable in a portable document format (.pdf) as well as is available as a softcover print copy that is perfect bound (pages are glued together at the edges of the spine). All three plan versions feature large blocks of text and paragraphs numbered for ease of reference, interspersed with tables and diagrammatic maps of London. A title page opens each chapter, either bearing full-page photography (Livingstone), full-page spot colour background (Johnson), or a thematic illustration (Khan). These graphic illustrations form part of my design work analysing the London Plan and other related publications. I used software tools, Adobe Illustrator and inDesign, to visually break down their page layouts, examining content placement, information hierarchy, and the relationship between text and image. This method helped to reveal intentions and aspirations connected to the text, locating where emphasis of content is placed and what textual-visual priorities are given. As well, it disclosed what is not overtly communicated: clues about the authors of the publications and the audiences being addressed. By comparing the different design treatment across pages and publications, I learned about where communication efforts were put, when something is produced in house or contracted out to designers, and why.

The page design is a simple layout with a standard top to bottom reading flow and a clearly delineated hierarchy of information: a main body of black text, in regular font weight, alongside helpful wayfinding text of headers, subheaders, captions, footers and folios, emphasised in bold weight and/or by colour. In Livingstone’s 2008 update, Johnson’s 2011 original and Khan’s 2021 plan, a unique colour is assigned to policy boxes in between title pages to differentiate one chapter from another. In Livingstone’s 2004 original and Johnson’s 2016 update, they remain the same colour throughout, purple in the former and salmon in the latter. The page margins in Johnson and Khan’s versions are equally distributed between top and bottom, left and right. Livingstone’s gives more white space to the outside margins to allow for a scattering of thumbnail-size photographs that visually support the text narrative. No photography appears in either of Johnson or Khan’s London Plans, save for the headshot of the mayors in their forewords.

With an easy to navigate content structure and copy text typically set at 12pt type size and 15pt leading (the vertical space between sentences), the documents overall are clear and legible, meeting accessibility standards. At a cursory glance, nothing is graphically outstanding about their communication design, little thought given to the plan’s presentation of content nor the arrangement of text. Serious and straightforward as expected of policy documents, there are no interactions between text blocks nor dynamic play to communicate different hierarchies of information and to draw the eye to areas of interest. Notwithstanding such minor design decisions as the colour of the chapter dividers or the inclusion of photography, there is more that is the same across the three plans than is different. ³

The standard structure and graphic restraint are partly due to the limitations set out by the GLA Act and the Town and Country Planning Regulations 2000 that provide for the form and content of the spatial development strategy, prescribing what the content of the strategy shall contain, what words to include in the title, and the scale and location of diagrams. ⁴ Beyond these requirements, however, there is no direction on document design, nowhere does it say it has to be A4 size. So, it’s curious the plans share a basic format, a uniformity of text placement and order, outwardly unremarkable from one another. In addition to format similarities to other mayoral periods, Khan’s plan appears to be a document similar in format to others produced by the GLA. It looks to be like m/any of their publications, visually consistent with other documents coming out of the Mayor’s office. The page design and content structure resemble his reports as if b­oth are produced by the same hand or author, or at least the same template. Per the colophon page, the London Plan 2021 is produced internally, the GLA being listed as publisher. The chapters were written by GLA officers, drafted using a Word template and then later assembled as a whole via InDesign, the desktop publishing software, into a publishable document that met standards set by GLA Creative, the Mayor’s in-house team with responsibility for and/or oversight of the creative work (design and copywriting) behind external communication. ^{5 6} Because of limited in-house expertise, ‘one guy’ from the data team helped assemble the document in InDesign.

Rather than the image of a drawing that normally comes to mind when visualising an architectural plan, the London Plan is instead essentially a text document, with lots of space dedicated to narrative and policy boxes and few drawings. The distribution of information leans heavily toward text, with illustrations and charts making up less than a third of the content. Looking at this document and its textual density, compared to the excitement of the publicity campaign associated with the 1943 County of London Plan discussed in the last chapter, the modern-day London Plan is downright staid.

Inspired by the County Plan’s publicity campaign, Jules Pipe, the Deputy Mayor leading the Khan plan’s development, “wanted [the GLA plan team] to do more of that kind of stuff.” ⁷ This is evident in the print material that supplemented the draft when it was first made public in November 2017, seen in their visual expressiveness and graphic variety. Pipe had requested additional material accompany the draft’s publication, setting out a design brief that called for these to be “innovative,” “well designed” to “a high visual standard,” and “informative, accessible and attractive.” ⁸ Because the Planning Team did not have the in-house capacity to undertake this work, they procured graphic design services to prepare this material. Given the urgency (two months production timeframe), the Creative Services Manager was content to outsource it. The graphic design service worked with the London Plan Team to specify and design the physical and digital representations of key London Plan information with the following criteria:

• adhere to the GLA’s design guidelines

• reflect the design framework of the main London Plan document

• work both in print and interactive online

• raise public awareness of the draft London Plan November 2017/March 2018

• engage Londoners’ interest such that people will respond online to the public consultation

• conceived and designed so that its life and value extends beyond the consultation period

The draft result was a promotional pack consisting of an A1 foldout poster (840 x 594 mm) and a series of A3 glossy, high resolution diagrams (420 x 297mm), all neatly tucked inside a green A4 folder. One side of the poster contains large blocks of text, that the GLA had envisioned as “analogous to an executive summary of the London Plan,” and the other side features “a map of London displaying key policy areas and items of interest from the London Plan, surrounded by infographics of key data.” ⁹ ⊕ Mayor of London (2017). The London Plan. Draft for Public Consultation. Promotional Pack.

The pack was designed and produced by Paul Dennis, Abbie Holloway and Scott Smith of 400, a design studio who collaborated with Polish illustrator and designer Jan Kallwejt on the poster’s vector artwork—the same map illustration found on the plan’s front cover and with close-ups of it within the chapter intros. In 400’s profile of the project on their website, they described working with the GLA Planning team and Kallwejt, as well as motion graphics artist Theo Tagholm, “to help bring the plan to life” through “carefully selected and crafted themes and landmarks for illustration” to showcase six key themes of the plan, and “how the Mayor and his team are working to make a better London for all.” ¹⁰ The description repeats the Mayor’s language used in the plan.

Similar to illustrated tourist maps one would find in major cities, the poster invites curiosity. Kallwejt’s illustrations have in fact been used as front pieces of programmes for urban exploration of metropoles like Dublin, Dubai, Istanbul, LA and Warsaw. ¹¹ ⊕ Jan Kallwejt’s illustration of Istanbul for a cover of The Good Life. Source: https://kallwejt.com He describes his work as universal with a cheerful vibe. ¹² Drawn in a yellow, cream, brown and green palette, the London map covers the geographic expanse of the GLA area of responsibility and combines features of the existing London experience—tube station roundels, parks with trees, and building terraces—along with future developments proposed in the plan. Instead of the technical drawings associated with planners or architects, which often require a level of training to read, the illustration had a general audience appeal. The map was praised for “its lovely detail” and “nice-looking design” by Mapping London, a popular blog that highlights the best maps of London. ¹³ Seen together, the illustration and supplementary publicity material work to visually attract readers’ attention and to communicate the plan as engaging.

A series of reports titled The Good Growth Agendas were published in 2016 intended as guidance to help shape future planning policy for the capital, alongside A Handbook for Supporting Diversity in the Built Environment, as part of the Good Growth by Design programme. Similar to the promo pack, these publications were designed and produced out of house, the former by Maddison Graphic, a Norwich-based studio, and the latter by Polytechnic, a London-based studio, and are much more user-friendly and easier on the eyes. There is greater visual variety and more interplay between text and image. They are less text-based. Colour and typography are used to effect for drawing attention to different content areas. Information is organised in digestible bits that facilitate a better reading flow compared to the long dense blocks of text in the London Plans. The smaller size format of the Agendas, 125 mm x 216 mm vs the standard report size of 210 mm x 297 mm, lend them a pamphlet feel, making them appear informal and conversational rather than official and technical. These design moves suggest the intended reader is not a bureaucrat, aimed instead at a wider readership than policymakers.

Contrasting the outputs, there is a graphic tension between the report likeness of the plan and the illustrative quality of the promotional pack, agendas and handbook. The outsourced design work conveys an objective of the plan to have external reach beyond the usual report readers. Per their website description, 400 is “an award-winning graphic design agency, internationally recognised for strategic creativity that unlocks brand potential.” ¹⁴ Their clients include the Royal Mail, the British Council and Transport for London. Kallwejt’s freelance list of clients include commercial, global brands like Honda, Sony and Nike. This underscores the existence of a kind of relationship between strategic planning and strategic nation branding discussed in the last chapter. To stay globally competitive and communicate its global city image, the GLA adopts the communication practices of commercial, global brands.

This link is reinforced by the staff makeup of the GLA’s Creative team. Michelle Jones, the Head of GLA Creative, has described her role as, “tasked with voicing Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s strategies and making them known to all Londoners, responsible for amplifying important messages across the city.” ¹⁵ In a talk with Oxford Student University Advertising Society, her work is alternatively described as “leading the strategic development and quality control of the Mayor of London brand, along with establishing the creative vision.” ¹⁶ The two descriptions connect the Mayor’s strategies to strategic brand development, maintained by strong ties to industry. Previously, Jones was a freelance creative for clients such as Coca Cola and IBM. She belongs to D&AD, formerly called British Design & Art Direction, a creative communication organisation whose world-wide members represent the creative, design and advertising communities. The format and sizing of the Good Growth Agendas differ from the report style of other standard GLA publications, resulting in a document that is more user-friendly and indicating a desire for it to have wider reach beyond the administrative minded who normally read reports.

While the city’s branding helped to raise London’s international profile and fortunes, discussed in the last chapter, the branding of the GLA was equally important to the success of the newly established government. The GLA’s formation at the start of the millennium brought a new way of governing. However, this presented politicians and policymakers with a dual dilemma: how to tell the story of the GLA to Londoners and to the rest of the world. As we saw, London’s continuing credentials as a world city were convincingly marketed on the global stage. At home, in the GLA’s early days, that task proved more difficult because, despite the momentous change, it turns out, according to a MORI 2001 annual survey of London, the GLA and the Mayor were not on most Londoners’ radar. ¹⁷ The survey was commissioned by the GLA to assess trends and changes in Londoners’ views. A combined 64% of Londoners did not know very much, nothing at all, or were unsure about what the Mayor of London is doing for London, a number that jumped to 87% when asked about the work of the London Assembly, the Mayor’s oversight arm.

In July 2002, a Campaign magazine article entitled, London Calling by writer Charlotte Goddard, acknowledged a similar discrepancy as the findings of the MORI survey that many Londoners were still confused about the role the authority plays in their lives. Because of the added confusion of having Ken Livingstone in charge again—the last leader of the last London government, the Greater London Council (GLC), become the new leader of the new London government—the GLA had their work cut out for them to communicate what’s different this time. One way to get the message out was through corporate branding. The headline announcing the new london.gov.uk website, read: ‘The GLA, London’s administration body, is revamping its web presence to offer easy-to-access information and build the city as a brand.’ ¹⁸ Campaign magazine is self-described as the world’s leading business media brand serving the marketing, advertising and media communities. Mark Watts, the GLA representative involved in the relaunch, found “the old site didn’t fit with the strong image represented by the ads we have run on buses and billboards throughout London,” while Paul Bishop of KPMG, the global consultancy behind the site revamp, said it “was not particularly intuitive.” ¹⁹

Quoting Watts and Bishop, Goddard described the new site’s ambitious aims in terms of giving the GLA greater visibility and awareness among Londoners. These aims echoed concerns expressed in a 2002 London Assembly report on the Mayor’s consultation with Londoners, Is the Mayor Listening, about the apparent lack of awareness about the GLA and the Mayor’s work, based on the MORI survey. A chapter titled, ‘Open and accessible to all,’ reviewed the availability of information from the GLA to Londoners, and identified the need to raise awareness.

In 2002, at the time of the report, the GLA mainly provided information about its activities through its website, GLA newsletters (for example, Londonline which was distributed monthly to 15,000 stakeholders and ON magazine which was sent twice a year to 2.3m London households), leaflets, the Mayor’s Annual Report, GLA events and advertising. ²⁰ To help increase their fledgling profile, concurrent with the website relaunch, the GLA introduced a brand style guide the same year as “a quick and easy way to see how the GLA should present itself” and to standardise communications across media and promote its activities to external audiences. ²¹ The guide introduces the basic design elements and outlines when and how to use the marque and logos to ensure consistency in communication across London as well as visual continuity for GLA branding. The GLA Design Team oversaw its rollout and provided staff guidance and approval for its use and application. ²² ⊕ London wordmark developed in 2002 by GLA’s head of marketing, Jayne Davies.

The guide focuses on the LONDON marque, a blue logo with an all caps styling of the word and the last two letters ‘ON’ emphasised in a different colour, typically red, to signal that London is open and active, effectively on rather than off. It was developed by the GLA’s then head of marketing, Jayne Davies. “The GLA needed an identity and a web site flexible enough to work in partnership with others as well as strong enough to provide a coherent brand for itself.” ²³ Davies explained to Goddard that the LONDON marque was a way to “sell London to Londoners,” reiterating a statement made in the guide, “to promote London to Londoners” and “to promote London in the UK and abroad.” ²⁴ While there are logos for the GLA, the Mayor of London and the London Assembly, it is the LONDON marque that “brings them all together.”

The LONDON marque uses the New Johnston typeface, an update to the Jonhston (1913) typeface made famous by London Underground, and digitised in 2002 for expanded use across the Transport for London (TfL) network. In a 2016 article celebrating 100 years since the original Johnston’s creation, London Underground’s Design and Heritage Manager Mike Ashworth asserted that, “Johnston is not just our typeface, it is the very typeface of London. You will find no Londoner who does not recognise it, nor the simplicity and authority Johnston brings to this city.” ²⁵ Considering the longer history of the underground versus the newness of the GLA in the new millennium, and given the strong identity and public recognition of TfL, there is a brand deliberateness to such a choice: tying in the authority’s work to one of the Mayor’s major statutory charges with what residents and visitors alike most visually associate with the city—the century-old London Transport Roundel. The red ‘O’ of the LONDON marque was meant to evoke the roundel to tap into this recognition. Since the underground is where most people encounter GLA adverts, using a symbol so familiar to many strengthens the brand association with the GLA.

Building on this historic antecedent, Mayors Johnson and Khan would go on to publish their own brand or style guidelines. A comparison of the visual vocabulary of the Mayors reveals subtle and distinct differences in graphic style and form, but the LONDON marque created in Livingstone’s time was useful and persists to this day. After Livingstone, the logotype the different colouring of ON is abandoned, instead, the full LONDON is stylized in all blue or black. Branding in this way, spreading a distinct look, was important to the success of the newly established GLA. Branding also provided a guidance for how GLA documents should look. The styling of the London Plan 2021 comes directly from Khan’s style guide, The Look Book: Mayor of London Brand Guidelines, which instructs report producers to follow a ‘standard MS Word report template.’ ²⁶ According to the guide, as with other communications materials, templates are used to produce publications which helps the GLA brand to be consistent and is part of best practices communicating the work of City Hall. It is why the London Plan has striking similarity to other reports. This is part of the GLA corporate brand identity.

This is reinforced by the typographic layout and the choice of typeface—the design of lettering and the appearance of characters and their arrangement on the page. The plans’ body copy has been typeset in Foundry Form Sans (Livingstone), Akzidenz Grotesk (Johnson) and Aktiv Grotesk (Khan). Created by a design studio based in Soho, Foundry (1999) is a modern typeface in the humanist tradition, meaning fonts characterised by a hand lettering look inspired by old style Roman scripts. It was conceived to be ideal for screen use, very economic with space, and legible at small sizes, with “just enough character to achieve a unique, timeless look.” ²⁷ Humanist typefaces tend to evoke more personality than their geometric counterpart, the grotesque family of type to which Akzidenz Grotesk (1898) and Aktiv Grotesk (2010) belong. Because Akzidenz Grotesk has a “dry and mundane feel [that] did not draw attention to itself,” the typeface was embraced fifty years after its introduction by Swiss designers and International Style devotees for its functionalist ethos without appearing overly stylized. ²⁸ It inspired Univers (1957) and Helvetica (1957) which were widely favoured in the mid-century by brands for corporate use, becoming mainstays for their contemporary feel and classic clean look. ²⁹ Univers has been famously used by FedEx, BP, and EBay and Helvetica by IBM and Apple; Akzidenz Grotesk by Volkswagen and the British Museum. Coming from this heritage, Aktiv Grotesk is a sans typeface designed by Swiss typographer Bruno Maag as an update to Univers and a contemporary alternative to the ubiquitous Helvetica, considered neutral, utilitarian, and serious. ³⁰

While the average reader may not be able to pick out which typeface is used in each London Plan in order to differentiate one plan from the next, this small detail—and the brand associations—points to a bigger picture: the use of a house style, standards for writing of a particular institution, or standards for graphic design as an aspect of corporate or organisational identity. ³¹ For instance, when navigating the tranche of documents in the GLA’s twenty year archive, where a date is not always clear, the house typeface, along with the specific version of the Mayor of London logo, helpfully timestamps whether a document is by Livingstone, Johnson or Khan, a subtle marker of each mayoralty. In this regard, before it is a planning document, the London Plan is a corporate document, having typographic standards borne of a corporate practice. The corporate look reaffirms what Gordon and Travers considers the ‘branding’ function of the London Plan and other documents produced by the Mayor to advertise to central government, used by the Mayor to project a certain image of City Hall. ³²

³³ The role of brand communication has grown since Khan took office, seeing an increase in promotional spending over the years. ³⁴ Presently, the Marketing, Digital and Creative teams, in coordination as part of the larger External Relations team, are responsible for the delivery of all aspects of the GLA’s integrated marketing and communication of plans and strategies, including public liaising, maintaining the GLA website, and producing and/or commissioning a variety of publicity projects, marketing campaigns and events. In 2018, the Mayor moved to disband the Business Support team, eliminating generic administrative work, to increase the capacity of the External Relations team to undertake more specialist communications work. The role of Communications Executive was created, along with the creation of a central marketing budget (previously dispersed across individual policy teams) to meet a new need arising out of “significant increase in workload across marketing,” “chang[ing] the structure and focus of the team to address both marketing campaigns and digital communications.” ³⁵

Niran Mothada, Executive Director of Strategy and Communications overseeing External Relations, notes that the GLA is responsible for communicating to 9 million people across London. In a 2021 London Assembly oversight committee meeting about the Mayor’s promotional ad spending, she describes that, compared to press offices across Government departments and other local authorities, theirs is only 15 people, small relative to the number of people they have to communicate to. ³⁶ At a time when other GLA budgets were being cut, Mothada explained that the marketing budget was specifically expanding to address staffing need.Working with an annual marketing budget of £5 million, including staff salary in addition to project costs, is miniscule relative to the budgets of some major corporations with a target audience less than 9 million people. The team must balance what they can reasonably achieve in-house or outsource the work, weighing where best to direct their communication efforts and limited resources. According to Emma Strain, Assistant Director of External Relations, they are “strategic and tactical” in what to prioritise and target for expenditure, including “buying support from the commercial sector.”

Questioned on how the team assesses value for money for their spending, Strain provided insight into the targeted nature of the GLA’s marketing work. ³⁷ She cited for example, the Pay It Forward campaign, part of the London Together campaign in 2020, where they spent £50,000 on communications and raised £2.5 million in funding that enabled 4,000 small businesses in London to be supported in those early days of the pandemic. It’s representative of how they work closely with policy teams to understand their commitments they plan to deliver then “package things up to message them appropriately,” in this case advancing the Mayor’s business goal. The focus is on messaging, suggesting a gap in priority: the cost-benefit calculus seems to indicate greater attention paid to these shorter term, public-facing types of communication, and less so on the actual communication of policy documents. The former yields quicker returns in investment while the latter are longer term outputs which have no immediate (measurable) impact in similar quantitative terms. The consequence for the London Plan is that a budget-conscious marketing team will dedicate more time to messaging broadly around the plan’s policies than to the communication design of the plan itself. As such, GLA Creative does not get involved in its publication.

Based on published figures of GLA Decisions, these tables show where the communication priorities laid for the London Plan 2021. The most significant amount of money, more than three quarters of London Plan spending, was spent on the examination in public process, while substantially less was spent on the draft’s consultation. Less than 1% of overall spending (£8,000 of £1,290,000 total) went to giving public notice about the draft London Plan’s existence. More funds were dedicated to developing online systems such as the London Plan Consultation Database than toward print communication. 48% of the costs (£617,000 of £1,290,000) covered the fees of Inspectors and EIP staff, including their salary, hotel and travel. These figures provide a budgetary reason for why the London Plan is not widely known to Londoners, per Mayor Khan’s acknowledgment in his foreword to the 2021 edition, and for why it is not in the general public consciousness.

There was little financial support to raise awareness about the plan, no effort equivalent on the promotional level of #LondonIsOpen or London Together campaigns to get the message out about the Mayor’s most crucial strategy. For the #LondonIsOpen campaign, £460,000 was spent on promotional videos, events and activity hubs “to ensure this great city continues to attract businesses, talent, investment and tourism from the EU and across the world, and to offer support to Londoners most impacted by Brexit.” ³⁸ The Mayor does make note that the #LondonIsOpen campaign is substantially less compared to the £60 million central government spent on its GREAT campaign in 2018 alone and the £100 million the Prime Minister had announced in 2019 for an advertising campaign on communications for Brexit. That amount exceeds the money spent (£308,000) on the entire draft consultation process, far more than on promoting the London Plan and the consultation itself. While the campaign and the plan are not easily comparable, the disproportionate spending does underscore a notable strategy in communication aims and represents the marketing calculus the mayor must make where best to allocate limited funds. In this case, it is toward marketing London’s greatness rather than the strategic plan that would materialise such greatness.

If the GLA Creative team’s focus is elsewhere, then what explains the London Plan publication design? The way information in the plan is presented leads us to an important historical consideration: the influence of corporate annual reporting on the corporatisation of government communications. The London Plan belongs to a genre of corporate documents: the annual report. Although statutory regulations drive how London Plan content is to be structured, it is the corporate operations of the GLA and the day-to-day business functioning of government, that constrains how the pages are designed. The public sector adopts practices from the private sector, including the ‘telling the story’ technique used by commercial advertisers, repurposed to persuade audiences of the GLA’s work and value.

For public accountability, the Mayor is required as set out in section 46 of the GLA Act to publish an annual report as soon as practicable after the end of each financial year on the exercise of his statutory functions in the preceding 12-month period. The report must detail his assessment of progress in implementing his strategies and information relating to the performance of the GLA’s functions. ³⁹ It provides an annual review of the Mayor’s priorities, achievements and coming year’s targets for the GLA Group, all organisations making up the GLA. Annual reports are also required to be produced separately for other divisions under his charge such as Transport for London, GLA Economics, and formerly the London Development Agency. The London Assembly must likewise produce its own annual report as part of its function to check on the Mayor’s performance. ⁴⁰

An annual report is the yearly story of a company’s trajectory, a snapshot documenting the organisation’s activities and finances in the previous year while providing an outlook for the next. One way to interpret the London Plan is to think of it as the (future) story of London; each edition is an account of how London as a city has been doing, where it presently is, and what it will (or its stakeholders hope it to) be in the coming years, and the costs involved to make it happen. The Mayor’s foreword in each plan, in fact, reads almost like a CEO’s shareholder letter of annual reports, including the requisite leader’s headshot. While an official annual report does get published every year, the following brief history of annual report design lays the groundwork for seeing the London Plan as a version of an annual report to be read alongside the actual annual reports.

In PRINT’s inaugural issueAnnual Report on Annual Reports (1964), which would become a yearly feature of the magazine over the next four decades, editor Martin Fox noted the growing importance of the annual report in corporate operations: ⁴¹

Preston, Wright and Young’s1996 study of annual report design of the 1980-90s, on the role of visual images, also recognised the importance of annual reports for corporations, specifically, to send “the right message [which] may be designed to enhance the story of corporate performance in financial statements.” ⁴² Citing PRINT’s cataloguing of annual reports, the authors pointed to “the development of annual reports from statutory document to a more visual medium through which corporations may seek to create and manage their images.” ⁴³

The March/April 2002 issue of PRINT goes even further with a featured article entitled, ‘Narrative Drive’, that asserts the best of today’s annual reports are “more about storytelling than financial reporting.” Writer Leslie Sheer highlighted “the annual report as a form of storytelling, the idea of [the company’s] work as the basis for narrative expression.” ⁴⁴ For example, the main text body of all three London Plans reads exactly like a ‘narrative’ and is referenced as such by GLA officers to portions that situate policy directions.

They take on a storied form. In Khan’s other strategies and supplementary planning guidance publications, the word is directly called out, as in, ‘circular economy narrative,’ or as described by Mæ Architects for their contribution to the Good Quality Homes for All Londoners, Housing Design SPG co-written with the GLA, “The SPG marks a shift in the culture of delivering housing. We are directing the narrative away from one about numbers and densities and towards one about lived experience, the circular economy and raising the baseline of development quality.” As previously shown in a design analysis breaking down the pages of the Intend to Publish version of London Plan 2021, the majority of content is styled as narrative surrounding policy text boxes. This narrative structure reflects Sherr’s point about the annual report’s uniqueness as a strategic document that can sway readers of a company’s unfolding story beyond its bottom line and lend credibility to the organisation: ⁴⁵

Replacing the words “annal reports” above with the London Plan, it’s easy to see how the London Plan has been a strategic vehicle that has shaped and reshaped public perception about the city and the work of the Mayor of London, part backward glance, part crystal ball, telling the story of London in a bid to persuade Londoners to support the Mayor’s vision.

In graphic design history, the 1960-70s were the heyday of annual report design in the US, especially the corporate work of American designer Paul Rand. Rand’s design of IBM’s annual reports was pioneering, presenting dull financial information in a new language of compelling imagery and visual relationships. ⊕ IBM Annual Reports produced by Paul Rand. Source: artsy.net The consequent increase in business interest fed into CEO Thomas Watson Jr.’s idea, “good design is good business.” ⁴⁶ The value of a well-designed annual report would be emulated in the UK a decade later to influence the storytelling on this side of the Atlantic.

Accounting historian Tom Lee’s paper on the historical change in the form of annual reporting of very large British industrial corporations, identifies “a distinct change in annual reporting emphasis - i.e. from predominantly accounting communications of corporate financial performance to non-accounting projections of corporate identity in a consumer-orientated world.” ⁴⁷ Sam McKinstry, a scholar in accounting and business history, has studied the British annual report through a historical review of the use of design and designers in the annual reports of Burton PLC from 1930 to 1994. He argues that the annual report had turned into a public relations document. ⁴⁸ By 1984, Burton’s annual report had transformed into a corporate communications tool, among the first British companies to reach this stage. Others would soon follow suit, and later central government and local authorities as well would pick up on this new approach to connecting with and relaying information to public audiences.

This reconfiguring of the annual report was a pivotal moment in the history of financial accounting of UK government, reflected in the adoption of corporate communication standards in their annual reporting. Across governmental bodies, government documents would more explicitly take on the form and structure of the annual reports of corporations and businesses, overhauled and streamlined in 2009-10 to match with private sector practices, per the Government Financial Reporting Review (2019) produced by HM Treasury. According to the report, the International Financial Reporting Standards of the private sector were interpreted and adapted for the public sector and applied for the first time in 2009. ⁴⁹ The result was that the standards and basic concepts underlying the preparation and presentation of financial statements for external users were “greatly improved,” “making it more consistent, credible and understandable.” ⁵⁰ Private standards became public standards.

In a further change in 2013, the Simplifying and Streamlining Statutory Annual Report and Accounts project was launched by HM Treasury with the aim of simplifying and streamlining the presentation of the statutory annual report and accounts (ARA) produced by various government departments so as to better meet the communication needs of users. One of the three high-level recommendations was a reporting requirement of “telling the story” to address “user criticisms that ARA lack an overall narrative and are difficult to understand.” ⁵¹ This gave rise to reports appearing less like spreadsheets and more like narrative-based evidence, mirroring the narrative drive Sherr had identified in commercial practice.

The consequence of this corporate alignment is government documents, like the London Plan, looking like corporate documents. The communication ties between corporate business and government reflect what geographer David Harvey had observed as the shift in urban governance from managerialism to entrepreneurialism in the 1980s, wherein governments act less like local providers and managers of services, and more like corporations oriented toward economic development. ⁵² Such corporatisation was exemplified in the last chapter by the marketing efforts of London mayors to keep the capital city in competition with other urban centres. It’s also reflected in the GLA’s organisational structure. The GLA operates as a corporation whose functions are managed by a corporate leadership team working with a budget of £130.9 million revenue and £2.4 billion capital, including £13.4 million for overall strategy and communications (numbers as of 2020). ⁵³

The London Plan’s corporate lineage and visual link to the annual report are most evident in the tight-knit relationship it has with GLA Economics, a division of the GLA established in May 2002 whose financial reporting on economic activities in London is the basis upon which plan policies are framed. Their data and analysis “form a basis for the policy and investment decisions facing the Mayor of London and the GLA group.” ⁵⁴ The annual reports of GLA Economics reflects the influence of corporate-style storytelling. The first annual report (2003) is a splashy, full colour document with playful typography and visually dynamic spreads featuring close-ups as well as wide-angle photos. In a section dedicated to Marketing, one of the stated marketing objectives was to establish GLA Economics as a recognisable brand name and develop a distinguishable identity, aligning with the unit’s larger objective “to target relevant audiences for the unit’s work and disseminate the information as widely as appropriate”: ⁵⁵

Under the guidance of David Chappell, Marketing and Publications Manager, and designed by Bonfire, a creative agency specialising in end-to-end marketing, including strategy, branding, advertising and digital marketing, the GLA Economics Annual Report aims to communicate what the unit is and what it does. ⁵⁶ ⊕ GLA Economics Annual Report 2004. The pages of this 2004/05 annual report featured colourful charts and imagery, including extensive photography, instead of the black and white pages typical of reports which were text-heavy and full of lists and tables. The design shows more considered page and typographic layout and a better visual story. This report was the UK finalist for the Federation of European Business Communicators Association Awards, an annual awards competition to recognise internal communication excellence throughout Europe, promote and share best practice in business communications. The win underscores the GLA’s embedded place in the business world. In 2003, GLA Economics had produced a range of publications, including Creativity, London’s Core Business and the Spreading Success – How London is Changing reports, which have “helped to develop and encourage debate about the structure and development priorities in the capital” and which “proved indispensable for informed discussion about London’s future during the public examination of [Livingstone’s] draft London Plan.” ⁵⁷

Not only was GLA Economics influential in the content makeup of the plan, it also influenced the design. Livingstone’s 2004 London Plan took some of its visual cues from the GLA Economics Annual Report 2004 as well as The London View: the Mayor’s Annual Report 2006/07, although the latter two reports are more image-heavy compared to the plan’s thumbnail dispersal. A pattern of the London Plan stylistically influenced by annual reports continued thereafter. Johnson’s 2011 London Plan appears nearly indistinguishable from the Mayor of London’s Annual Report 2010/11. With Sadiq Khan, there is noticeable visual consistency between his 2016-17 Mayor of London’s Annual and Equality Report (published June 2017) and the Department for Communities and Local Government’s Annual Report and Accounts 2016-17 (published June 2017). Both publications follow a recognisable pattern of presentation of information: blocks of narrative text supported by charts, tables and diagrams. In turn, his draft London Plan 2017 is near identical in format to the 2016-17 Mayor of London’s Annual and Equality Report. These graphic illustrations form part of my design work analysing the London Plans and mayoral annual reports. I used the software tool Adobe inDesign for a visual comparison of their page layouts, content placement, information hierarchy, and the relationship between text and image. This exercise revealed the similarities between publications and helped me to better understand the GLA’s publishing practice of producing reports.

In the Narrative Drive article about the design of annual reports, Sherr challenges some graphic designers’ suggestion that “the annual report is really a corporate brochure, the keynote in a symphony of marketing materials that business puts out each year,” instead, she purports that while the brochure “exists to inform the reader, the annual report exists to entice, cajole, educate, seduce, exhort, and ultimately, sell the business so that the reader will find it worthy of investment. And that means an entirely different expectation and performance.” ⁵⁸ The expectation and performance of the London Plan, in part, as this and previous chapters have discussed, is to sell London and London’s businesses and new business potential. With each Mayor’s publication, the plan signals to developers and buyers of London’s readiness for investment. Joining up with the previous discussion on marketing and brand identity, the London Plan’s near function as, and resemblance to, an annual report affirms the document’s corporate lineage. The audience is not simply the end user, Londoners and planners, but business leaders, shareholders, investors, and financial report readers, which include developers and central government. The direct and indirect links between the London Plan and annual reports reveal a behind-the-scenes marriage between strategic planning and corporate accounting.

The London Plan’s report likeness is rooted in another corporate practice: documenting evidence to meet specific business goals. Of the over 3,000 documents related to the London Plan 2021, a vast majority of them are reports categorised by the GLA as evidence or data to support policy proposals. So, while the London Plan is a corporate document of a well-told story, it is still also about substantiating each Mayor’s vision of London through information-giving.

In the interregnum period (1986-2000) between the end of the Greater London Council and the start of the Greater London Authority, when London did not have a centralised, metropolitan wide authority, the capital’s government was principally in the hands of the 32 boroughs and the City of London. Strategic planning powers rested with central government and local committees. This included the London Planning Advisory Committee (LPAC) responsible for preparing strategic advice for central government’s planning guidance statement. Ian Gordon notes that this system led to several significant changes in the processes of London governance, one of which is of major relevance here: “commissioning and publication by various bodies of an unprecedented series of reports from academic/commercial consultants on strategic issues in relation to the London economy.” ⁵⁹

On trend with the slew of audits and appraisals introduced to public policy nationally by New Labour of the early 90s, report writing became common in local London government. The GLC’s former research and intelligence unit had supported itself through income from its services disseminating statistical data it collected that would be used by other agencies to support various development schemes. ⁶⁰ The unit was reconstituted into the London Research Centre (LRC) in 1985. ⁶¹ Funded partly by the boroughs, with other income generated from consultancy and contract research work for other organisations, LRC offered six specialist services, including publications, databases, research and survey services, and library services, and had produced over 250 publications. ⁶²

LRC’s prolific outputs, especially the research reports done by the Environmental and Development Studies section, were important to the work of LPAC. Because of limited staffing resources at LPAC, the committee relied on “others (eg consultants, the boroughs, and the LRC) to provide most of the information and analysis they need.” ⁶³ So valuable was its work that LRC, along with LPAC, was one of four pan-London organisations that would be absorbed into the GLA when the new London government formed in 2000. ⁶⁴ By this time, such practice involving data collection, production and dissemination was commonplace and continued with the work of the GLA’s Intelligence Unit, LRC’s successor, and the establishment of GLA Economics in 2002. Producing publications as an evidence base for decision-making was formalised within GLA activities and is ongoing today. The GLA tap academics, planners, designers, and other built environment professionals to contribute their expertise to inform the Mayor’s policies.

Evidence (‘information’) has both a policy and public function. GLA Intelligence established a knowledge database in the 2000s which is today offered free to access from the London Datastore, a data-sharing portal. ⁶⁵ ⊕ Greater London Authority (2022) London Datastore. source: https://data.london.gov.uk It provides a thousand-plus datasets ranging in topics, including jobs and economy, transport, environment, community safety, housing, communities, health and London as a world city, all areas of strategic policy under the charge of the mayor. The Planning London Datahub launched in March 2021 provides open, accessible data as part of the GLA’s “drive to unlock data about development proposals in London […] to enable a live picture of how the city is changing, how planning policies are impacting that change, and how that is impacting the environments we live in.” ⁶⁶ The digital platform used by the Datahub is called Tableau Public, free data visualisation software to help visualise and publish “public (not private) data […] available for anyone to see online.” ⁶⁷ This type of openness lines up with the open government data movement in the past decade to “promote transparency, accountability and value creation by making government data available to all.” ⁶⁸

Underpinning the Datahub’s offering is a binding statutory agreement between the GLA and London Local Authorities (LLAs) for the collection of information relating to any matters concerning Greater London or any part of it. The Datahub replaces the London Development Database which ran from 2004 until 2021 as a collaborative project between the Mayor and London boroughs to monitor the progress of development plans across London. ⁶⁹ The LDD, and now the Datahub, fall under the Information Scheme of the GLA Act 1999. The Scheme was set up and maintained “to receive data from the LLAs about planning permissions, related permissions, approvals, certificates and consents and their implementation (‘the Information’). The Mayor may use the Information to monitor the effectiveness of policy outlined in the London Plan and other Mayoral strategies, and may provide the Information for research, analysis and educational purposes.” ⁷⁰

The word ‘Information’ is capitalised in the Scheme as a proper noun, given due weight for its importance. Publishing in the context of the London Datastore is practiced as an informational, ‘technical exercise,’ according to Andrew Collinge, the GLA’s lead officer on data and the broader Smart Cities agenda, “making data central to delivering social, economic and environmental value in our city”. ⁷¹ The London Datastore received international recognition in 2015 winning the gold medal at the Annual Open Data Awards conferred by the Open Data Institute, and co-presented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. In the press release about the award, Collinge speaks of the Datastore as the urban operating platform the smart city requires to exploit the value of city data.

This essentialist embrace of data aligns with the belief of technology enthusiasts today in “dataism,” what historian Yuval Noah Harari criticises as the universal faith in the power of algorithms to change the world, one in which “homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm.” ⁷² Proponents of governance by data, such as Collinge, value the information they can extract from data to inform decision-making. But while the hope is that data may deliver “social, economic and environmental value,” it doesn’t necessarily deliver equality. Data, like any resource having perceived value, is vulnerable to manipulation, distortion, and by the GLA’s admission, exploitation. Beyond the data content itself, it matters as much who is collecting the data, extracting it and interpreting (visualising) it. Data is not neutral; it is a source of contention linked to the biases of the data visualiser. Lauren Klein, a scholar in the digital humanities, has argued that “our current standards on data visualisation are successful at presenting clear arguments, at providing evidence for historical or literary interpretations, and at providing a sanitized container for the display of quantitative data,” however in her view, visualisations need to alternatively “prioritise uncertainty and individual agency in the act of knowledge production rather than the authoritative voice of the data visualiser.” ⁷³ Klein analysed the work of three 19th-century female “data visualizers” (Emma Hart Willard, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody). Rather than data visualisation as an evidentiary tool to prove something, Klein values it as a meaningful interpretative tool.

The drive for data-as-evidence, however, is a GLA-wide fixation. The London Assembly, the scrutiny arm of the GLA with oversight of the Mayor and his policies and proposals, is likewise in on this form of data-centric publishing practice. Their primary mode of operation is to produce publications in response to Mayoral publications. In addition to holding the Mayor to account by examining his decisions and actions, they carry out investigations on behalf of Londoners to press for changes to national, Mayoral or local policy. ⁷⁴ As elected officials, Assembly members position themselves as champions for Londoners on whose behalf they publish findings—other data not already considered by the Mayor—to fill in the gaps. ⁷⁵

As one GLA officer, who is also a lead member of the London Plan team, describes it, his job is to mainly gather information, akin to being a collector of evidence, a filterer of information. The extent of his written contribution to the London Plan is limited to the documents he commissions, seeking out the information and data that each policy officer determines in their judgment align with the goals of the policy area under their charge. Otherwise, the primary task is to circulate documents.

Media critic and filmmaker Hito Steyerl (2013) talks about circulation in relation to image production in the Internet Age and digital technology-enabled reproduction and dissemination: “Circulationism is not about the art of making an image, but of postproducing, launching, and accelerating it.” ⁷⁶ Applied to the London Plan, the task of GLA officers isn’t to solely write or create original documents per se but to commission, gather, collate and/or reproduce other people’s documents; in other words, to postproduce, launch and accelerate their circulation. See also Florian Cramer’s essay on Tragedy of the Commons for his insights into circulationism By the GLA officer’s account, the task of evidencing isn’t always easy. Because of the high volume of information to deal with, he notes the team’s frequent scramble to collect, manage and produce documents, in a compressed timeframe and to mark-up drafts and track version changes of the London Plan. Much of his daily work and stress are about capturing and managing evidence.

Taken as a whole, local government officers are de facto data producers, collectors, and circulators. The GLA is an accumulator of reports and expert publications, which are used by the GLA and the Assembly to inform the wider public. As information gatherers, the GLA works in a show-and-tell manner, here is the evidence we have collected that supports and communicates clearly the Mayor’s vision for London. Through print and digital means, their publishing practices are about documentation and clarity, information gathering for the purpose of producing evidence, showing the homework behind the Mayor’s strategies and plans. Thus, the London Plan is a report of reports, a document of documents, the outcome of a process I call, ‘evidencing.’

On a webpage entitled, ‘London Plan Evidence’, the GLA’s work is described as “prepar[ing] and commission[ing] evidence to support its work and understanding implementing the London Plan and delivering Good Growth.” ⁷⁷ Not only for government, evidencing is also a public practice today. Despite planning turning its back on publicity to favour direct public involvement over the giving of information, outlined in Chapter 4, publication becomes a form of participation in its own right. The act of information-giving and gathering (evidence-producing) that was once the exclusive practice of plan-makers is now an essential task of getting involved with having a say about London’s future, and is the main activity of London Plan participants. Publics educate planners.

In recent years, in response to the plethora of government publications, paralleling the official publishing route is a do-it-yourself (DIY) and do-it-with-others (DIWO) or do-it-together (DIT) ethos about the production of alternative plans and texts on the city’s future. DIY, DIWO, and DIT take advantage of developments in contemporary self-publishing practice that have widened access to communication technologies and public-making platforms. ⁷⁸ Alongside the proliferation of authoritative, data-centric publications is the proliferation of counter-publications by counterpublics to circulate a different approach to London’s planning. Contrasting the informative kind of publishing from the ‘experts,’ is interventionist publishing to signal the existence and content of a different kind of expertise.

The radical publishing of the GLC in the 80s aimed to re-centre and expand the definition of who is an expert. A notable example is the Popular Planning Unit (PPU) of the GLC, a circle of experts with tremendous influence trying to pull London towards their preferred future. Hilary Wainwright writes of the GLC story, PPU members, before joining the unit and having come from the political struggles of the 70s, had backgrounds in helping workers and communities in different ways to share and collectivise their practical knowledge. ⁷⁹ The PPU was a key driver of the socialist politics of the 1980s, described by one of its lead proponents Robin Murray as an experiment of a new form of public administration that coordinates with, rather than merely represents the public. ^{80 81}

Funded by the GLC, The People’s Plan for the Royal Docks (1984) is one of the most high-profile cases from the Thatcher era of popular planning in action. ⊕ Newham Docklands Forum and GLC Popular Planning Unit (1983) The People’s Plan for the Royal Docks. Silvertown residents and organisers drew up their own plan, a 40-page document, as an alternative to the proposed but unwanted development of a new airport in the Docklands in east London. The residents succeeded in a public inquiry, which upheld their plan over that of the airport consortium. However, the airport went ahead nonetheless (now London City Airport) because the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) overseeing the development did not heed the recommendations. Created as a special power by the Thatcher government, the LDDC was answerable only to central government and had no obligations to the public inquiry or the people’s plan. ⁸²

Despite the outcome, the People’s Plan was precedent-setting for community-based alternative planning. Together with the People’s Plan for Coin Street (1984), another and more successful example, it was representative of planning originating from the neighbourhood level, using publication to harness the collective power and capacity of Londoners. Working “in and against the state” per Wainwright’s account, the GLC occupied a unique position of equally being a producer working within government and a provoker of government. They were “simultaneously both GLC ‘officers’ up against hostile administrative institutions and also socialist economic advisors employed to turn the GLC into an animator, resource and platform, supporting Londoners’ struggles to defend and create decent jobs, resist inequalities, and build convivial, sustainable communities.” ⁸³

The PPU engaged in varied publishing activity, including monthly newsletters and innumerable proposals, to promote policies alternative to those handed down by central government. As a push back to the national Conservative Party’s political advertising posters that had partly brought them into power in the late 70s, the Labour edition of the GLC were deliberative in their political counter-publishing and became a thorn in the Thatcher administration’s side, generating a mass of manifestos, technical documents, multilanguage publications and plentiful press coverage, Michael Edwards has noted, well produced, widely distributed, and affordable. ⁸⁴
The London Industrial Strategy (1985), The Labour London Plan (1986) and Campaign for a Popular Culture (1986) were especially important documents that countered Thatcher’s thinking, developed with input from and in coordination with local communities. ⊕ Greater London Council (1985) The London Industrial Strategy. source: https://robinmurray.co.uk/new-page-1 ⊕ Greater London Council (1986) The London Labour Plan. source: https://robinmurray.co.uk/new-page-1 ⊕ Greater London Council (1986) Campaign for a Popular Culture. source: https://robinmurray.co.uk/glc-home Through their own effective dissemination efforts, publishing here was used to circulate practical and tacit knowledge from experts that included residents, workers, and community activists and organisers, not just the learned expertise of the planner or the professional.

The work of the PPU and their publications were precedent-setting and signalled a shift toward publishing by experts with tacit knowledge. In the decades to follow, in the face of accelerated urban change seemingly out of their control, an increasing number of citizens felt compelled to turn to each other and self-organise to produce independent publications that represented how they wanted their neighbourhoods and local areas to take shape. Self-publishers emerged to put forward their versions and visions of the city. The GLC’s larger story (1981-86) provided an inspirational blueprint for some residents, campaigners and activists. ⁸⁵ From the 1990s and onwards, with the arrival of home computing and the internet, they were able to take up available tools of desktop publishing and mass communication to fight their development battles on their own, alongside as well as outside of the normal government mechanisms and the usual expert circuit. The following are contemporary examples of alternative publications.

Southwark Notes Archive Group (SNAG), for example, are “some local people actively opposing but also writing a lot about the regeneration and gentrification of Southwark that’s happened over the last 20 years,” to ask, “whose regeneration?” ⁸⁶ They act as an independent voice for the local communities affected by the intensive urban transformation of the borough, in highly contested areas such as the Heygate and Aylesbury Estates. Their website is a repository for development news and activism updates with a call to arms for refusal of regeneration. SNAG generates their own as well as source research that responds locally to the activities of private developers and local authorities. Southwark Notes makes public and visible a variety of alternative texts. ⁸⁷

Union Press (2012) was an ad-hoc and temporary publishing house dedicated to Union Street in South London. ⁸⁸ An open publishing workshop examining the ins and outs of Union Street and its surrounding communities while experimenting with forms of public production and publication. For a 14-day period in summer 2012 Union Press opened its doors on Flat Iron Square from a custom designed kiosk which housed the press and became the centre of numerous activities inviting visitors and passers-by to actively get involved in publishing Union Street. Each day Union Press hosted an invited collaborator who took up day-long residency on site to produce a one-off publication responding to specific interests in Union Street. Contributors included an anthropologist, local poets, activists, a journalist, an art historian, architects and graphic designers.

Learning from Kilburn (2013-14) was a tiny experimental university that used the high street as a campus location to offer a six month-long programme for the local community in Kilburn, a north London neighbourhood, to learn about and reflect knowledge from and of the local area. ^{89 90} The project was by Spacemakers, directed by Tom Keeley in collaboration with OK-RM and Pernilla Ohrstedt Studio and funded by the London Boroughs of Brent and Camden. The school ran a series of free classes that aimed to help local people study what makes Kilburn the place it is, and to create a space for the community to imagine new futures for the area. The classes were then streamed online on MixCloud for sharing with a wider public.

What Walworth Wants (2017-18) was a local community planning-publishing project by We Made That, an architecture and urban practice focused on public realm. ⁹¹ ⊕ ⊕ We Made That (2016). What Walworth Wants. source: https://www.wemadethat.co.uk/projects/what-walworth-wants They worked together with traders on East Street Market, the Walworth Society and local community groups to generate ideas for the area’s future. The final output—targeted at Southwark Council and the GLA—was a binder of community-developed proposals for short interventions and long-term investment for the area between Walworth Road and Old Kent Road. In the spirit of other We Made That projects like the locally produced newspaper, The Unlimited Edition, tacit knowledge of the community is centred and circulated to drive future developments. ⊕ We Made That (2016). The Unlimited Edition, Issue V Bermondsey. source: https://www.wemadethat.co.uk/insight/the-unlimited-edition The published outcomes formed the evidence basis for boroughs to take action.

Taking its cue from The People’s Plan at the Royal Docks, The People’s Empowerment Alliance for Custom House (PEACH) is a community organisation in Newham who self-organised and used publication to affect local change. PEACH comprises of residents and shopkeepers of Custom House, an ethnically diverse and economically challenged district in east London. ⁹² Proposed plans for regeneration of the area in 2003 had put pressure on existing local communities at risk of displacement by the private development scheme. In 2017, in response to Newham Council’s redevelopment intentions that, in PEACH’s view, to date had insufficiently taken into account the local area needs and priorities, PEACH self-organised to run an independent 8-month long public engagement process that resulted in a 250-page draft document and master plan. ⁹³ ⊕ ⊕ Poster excerpt from PEACH (2017) The Alternative Regeneration Plan.

The publication presented a community-led alternative approach to regeneration. Like the People’s Plan,The Alternative Regeneration Plan made the local perspectives public and materially concrete, giving them a documentary legitimacy that led to the start of a working relationship between the community and Newham Council. ⁹⁴ In 2019, the Custom House Steering Group was set up for residents to work with the Council’s Regeneration Team members to co-produce a new plan more in line with what locals wanted. ⁹⁵ Although PEACH approaches co-production with caution if it will yield positive results, this process represented a willingness by both parties to try a different arrangement in how locals and local authorities interact, greatly made possible through PEACH’s publication efforts. By gathering and publishing their own data, their alternative plan was the foot in the proverbial door to greater participation and the wedge that kept it open. Like SNAG, for PEACH, publishing has become a central (productive) activity of resistance to regeneration efforts.

Many of these projects join up the skillsets and perspectives of a multitude of publics to publish about local area developments. Publishing projects like these abound and are increasingly recognised by local authorities for their value to represent thinking at the scale of the community and neighbourhood level that communitarianism and localism had made a standard focus of policymakers. The challenge, however, is that a majority of the initiatives are site-specific one-offs or tactical interventions not always easy to reproduce and difficult to scale up. It’s a setback communities face in trying to achieve structural change city-wide. Articulating on-the-ground, lived experiences often butts up against the professional planner’s practice of “viewing and depicting the city from above” as well as against the Mayor’s statutory remit to see the bigger picture of London rather than on discrete terms. ⁹⁶

This is where the Just Space network has seen an opportunity to come in to link up localised activities to cross over to the strategic side of London planning, already mentioned in previous chapters. They help community groups to disseminate their lessons to others who may face similar issues and to become more strategic about how they respond to urban change in their areas by joining forces to stitch together bottom, top and side views. Where PEACH may have one part of the picture from an east London perspective and SNAG another from south London, Just Space has positioned itself to work strategically from a London-wide point of view to mobilise discrete knowledges and knit a cohesive and comprehensive image of what’s happening across the capital.

Their particular methodology is ‘evidencing’, in some ways mirroring the practice of official planning processes earlier discussed. Because prompts to get involved in planning, generally, and the London Plan, specifically, tend to be framed as calls for evidence, producing data-type publications becomes their creative and productive vehicle to argue a counter-narrative to conventional expert knowledge. A major task of Just Space is to also collect data, as GLA policy officers do. They collate anecdotal evidence from the experiences of groups like SNAG, PEACH, and others in the Just Space network, including the London Tenants Federation (LTF), joining them up to create critical mass of strategic significance. ⁹⁷ With roots dating back to the 1980s as a forum for London’s council housing tenants, LTF works “to ensure tenants are involved in the production of London-wide housing and planning policy and influencing national housing policy.”

In 2014, Just Space, London Tenants Federation, and SNAG teamed up to publish Staying Put! An Anti-gentrification Handbook for Council Estates in London, a how-to guide drawn from the experiences of council estate residents and communities organising against gentrification in London. ⁹⁸ In one section, it advises would-be campaigners to “build evidence for your story through photographs, videos, and radio recordings as well as documents.” ⁹⁹ The authors stress the importance of archiving to create a record for future use as an open resource and for reflection and debate.

In 2015, Just Space published, London for all! A handbook for community and small business groups fighting to retain workspace for London’s diverse economies. ¹⁰⁰ The work of PEACH at Custom House and of a community planning group at the Carpenters Estate (with the support of Just Space and LTF) were two of ten case studies documented that tells the stories of local community and small business groups resisting development plans and developing their own proposals and plans. The handbook “draws together the experience and knowledge gained […] so that others can learn from it.” ¹⁰¹ Like the recommendation in Staying Put, the handbook similarly advises future resisters to ‘get the evidence’ (undertake and marshal their own local research and evidence) as well as to ‘get involved in the Council’s evidence-based studies’.

This model of participation through evidence production culminated in Just Space’s 2016 publication ofTowards a Community-Led Plan for London, Policy Directions and Proposals, involving input from many community organisations. ¹⁰² ⊕ Just Space (2016) Towards a Community-Led Plan for London. source: https://justspacelondon.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/just-space-a4-community-led-london-plan.pdf The 75-page document was a pre-emptive strike in anticipation of Mayor Khan’s then forthcoming 2017 draft London Plan to foreground community voices that might not be reflected in it. It aimed to claim rights to the city by and for those who do not have them under present conditions, heralding a new approach to responding to the London Plan. ¹⁰³

Proposing our own becomes, in practice, publishing our own version. The document mimics the format of past London Plans, an A4 size layout with coloured headings and policy proposals called out in coloured text boxes. With proposals set out topic by topic, as noted in the opening instruction on ‘how to use this document,’ the thematic organisation is intentional to reflect the current structure of the London Plan.

By deliberately reproducing the same communicative language, Just Space makes the publication appear to be the community edition of the London Plan, in so doing hoping to give it the same policy and evidentiary weight, by extension, legitimacy, as the GLA edition. Description of the alternative plan on Just Space’s website, however, is telling of their desire to depart from the GLA norm in one significant aspect: “Avoiding a corporate planning style, the document took the form of an illustrated tabloid newspaper.” ¹⁰⁴ The illustrations by Lucinda Rogers that animate the pages call back to the hand sketched drawings in the Skeffington Report, an implicit reference to the prompts for better public participation and greater involvement of people in planning the report had provoked.

The visual associations and the copying gesture take Just Space’s public participation beyond commenting through consultation, into the territory of direct communication. Asked about the effectiveness of the community-led plan for integration into the London Plan, Michael Edwards responded that it works as a campaigning tool. Although meant to communicate an alternative, the non-corporate plan, in this sense, is no different from the corporate London Plan, also used by the mayor as a campaigning tool.

Thinking differently, however, has tended to constitute adopting some same practices as the GLA. In 2020, Just Space and LTF launched a community resource called Estate Watch. ¹⁰⁵ The new website highlights over 35,000 London homes under threat and at risk of demolition, operating in a similar map-based way to the GLA’s Planning London Datahub, likewise foregrounding data. Their data tells an alternative story about the housing crisis and gives community context to the roster of developments in the official Datahub. The online repository emerged from a research project by Just Space and LTF working with the University of Leicester and King’s College London that has provided detailed evidence since 1997 of the displacement of London council tenants and leaseholders through regeneration schemes. This data has been regularly included in LTF’s responses to the London Plan.

Estate Watch, arguably, seeks to fill a data void that exists in conventional systems of counting and classification like the London Datahub. Feminist geographer Joni Seager has asserted, “what gets counted counts.” ¹⁰⁶ Quoting Seager in their book on Data Feminism, Klein alongside co-author Catherine D’Ignazio underscores that, “what is counted—like being a man or a woman—often becomes the basis for policymaking and resource allocation,” and that “data collection efforts often still leave many people out, including nonbinary people, lesbians, and older women.” ¹⁰⁷ In London’s housing affordability crisis, Estate Watch highlights, minority groups like this disproportionately experience precarious living and insecure housing situations. In her research for the project, geographer Loretta Lees’ rough estimate that 131,000 tenants and leaseholders have been displaced since 1997 related to the 55,000 council homes demolished in estate renewal schemes, as an example, are figures and people that do not show up on official counts unless it’s at the insistence of affected communities to be included, as LTF has worked to do in decades of organising. ¹⁰⁸

Because the “realities of ‘regeneration’ for resident communities are very different to what is depicted on council websites and brochures,” the website was produced to address this evidence gap and to provide tenants with “independent facts and resources” so that they may “try to engage on more equal terms in discussion about the future of their homes and communities.” ¹⁰⁹

In their evaluation of their participation in the development and examination of the new London Plan, quoted above, LTF emphasised the importance of evidence to making progress in their attempt to influence planning policy, having succeeded, through publication, to effect some changes and make some improvements to the plan more attentive to grassroots needs and their preferred focus on tackling economic, environmental and social inequalities that produce spatial inequality. Counter-publishing has become a fruitful planning activity by those normally not engaged in planning in order to close the gap between tacit and expert knowledge and to better inform local area as well as London-wide developments.

Like the ‘expert’ publishers, these ‘other experts’ have a shared orientation toward the use of data with an evidentiary purpose to promote the equitable legitimacy of their perspectives. Just Space, London Tenants Federation, SNAP and PEACH each have an active online presence, a website full of research writings with a dedicated, well maintained archive of publications. SNAG and Just Space run on Wordpress, a self-publishing microblogging platform. The media affordances of Wordpress—easy access with low technical threshold to use—allow local people in an informal alliance to produce apace, and sometimes at scale, with the publication outputs of formal institutions, the GLA and local authorities. Taking ownership of data, evidence, and research, through self-publishing in the above ways, gives them opportunities to build their arguments.

In 2010, reflecting on the work of Just Space, Michael Edwards had asked, do Londoners make their own plans? The answer is not only yes, but they also self-publish them. Observing the publishing activities of groups like SNAG and Just Space, community-led publications emerge as valuable not only as a product, ie producing new or alternative knowledges and histories, but also as an evidencing process and a document practice. Evidencing (the act of creating or collecting evidence) and then documenting (making a record of that evidence) are part of a set of their activist practices to intervene in dominant discourses or expand upon them—to make the uncounted count. Because data is valued as a currency of legitimacy, they undertake data-publishing activities, in efforts to influence planning decisions, to shift the data and widen debates to include other ways of counting.

The London Plans across mayoralties have had a consistent look and format, most closely resembling an annual report. The document takes its design cues from the GLA’s branding and identity style guidelines, which were necessarily developed in the authority’s early days of relative obscurity and confusion to help communicate London to Londoners. The page margins are determined by the corporate marques pressed upon them, reflective of the London Plan’s relationship with corporate branding and accounting. The plan has a narrative structure and is expressed in a storied form to further tell and sell the story of London. With the London Plan 2021, upon the draft’s introduction, there was an attempt to give the usually serious publication more graphic excitement through supplementary print material, inspired in part by the publicity campaign of the 1943 County of London Plan, but ultimately, because of limited in-house capacity and resource, and driven by other administrative and financial pressures, it retains a report-likeness. It is visually similar to other publications produced by the Mayor and the GLA.

At the same time that the London Plan is a product of corporate practices, it also produces a plethora of documents for the GLA corporation required by an evidence-based approach to strategic planning. In fulfilment of their accountability remit, the role of GLA officers and government officials is to be information gatherers and givers. The documents they produce are therefore evidentiary and informative, forming the evidence base to support the London Plan. They were made available on the GLA website in the EIP Library to inform the draft’s full review during the Examination in Public process.

In response, participants involved in inputting into the London Plan have taken up their own documentary practices to produce alternative evidence, reports and plans. This follows on from a recent history of counter-publication by counter-publics that has animated and shaped the debate about London’s spatial development, in which self-publishing is a tactical necessity to even the playing field, or sometimes, in the cases of Just Space, London Tenants Federation, Southwark Notes Archive Group, and PEACH, to get ahead of it.

The next chapter, Public Record, looks at the impact the GLA’s corporate operations has on the London Plan’s public access, shifting focus to digital technologies from the more print-based ones discussed in this chapter. It expands on the role of evidencing reviewed above on the GLA’s practice of record-keeping and producing electronic documents in order to preserve the corporate memory, examining the London Plan’s digital footprint as part of the Mayor’s remit for public accountability.