The Greater London Project
London is already great, and it can be even greater.
It is typically British to be pessimistic about things that you love. So it isn’t a surprise that many Londoners think that London is beyond saving. But a few of us have been talking, and we disagree. London is already great, and it can be even greater.
London is already the capital of the world. Every year, people come from across the world to be in London. It is the greatest symbol of the city’s success that people from all over the globe want to uproot their lives and move here – and they do so, in their thousands. You could go to a different gallery, play, concert, restaurant, park, or museum every day for the rest of your life here without ever getting bored. It is home to some of the most important and exciting companies in the world, which sit alongside some of the oldest and most august ones. It is constantly becoming home to new smart and interesting people, and new businesses, ideas, and scientific breakthroughs are created here every day.
Where else would you set up companies like Hoxton Farms, growing synthetic fats for food, or Wayve, pioneering autonomous cars, a short trip away from Lloyds of London (est. 1689) and Twinings Tea (est. 1706)? It is a global cultural centre for art, literature, architecture, theatre, dance, and fashion. From Pinewood Studios to Broadcasting House to Abbey Road it has consistently produced generation-defining films, TV and music for almost a century.
Public transport is more reliable and extensive than in any other British city. TfL is a great innovator in transport infrastructure: it pioneered contactless payment through both Oyster Cards (first introduced in 2003) and bank cards (2014), practices that have since been adopted around the world.
The best writing in the world was written in London – from Shakespeare, Dickens and the Bloomsbury Set, to Dianna Wynne Jones and Kazuo Ishiguro. Many of the biggest matches in the history of sport have been won and lost right here, from Wembley, Wimbledon, the Oval, Lords and Twickenham, to the Olympic Park and the Red Bull Gaming Sphere. London’s Royal Parks, several of which are located right in the city centre, are world-class. We regularly get to celebrate new infrastructure like the Elizabeth Line, and we could be building more underground lines like it – spacious and well ventilated. And walking through King’s Cross, East Village and the Portobello Road regeneration, it’s clear that modern, dense and liveable development is possible – and in the areas we need it the most.
But it has its challenges too. We don’t build nearly enough homes, and many of the ones we have are completely inadequate for what people need. We don’t even build our share of homes for London’s share of the UK’s population, let alone enough for the city to expand. If London built enough so that every Brit who wanted to move here could, it would be building three or four times as much as it does now. At the moment, too many people who already live here are forced out as they settle down, and can’t afford large enough homes to have families.
Too much of our infrastructure is crumbling. Hammersmith Bridge, for example, has been closed to vehicles since 2019, awaiting repairs for five years. The cost has more than doubled during delays while the borough, Transport for London and the Department for Transport argue over who should pay. Meanwhile, sandbags are regularly being dragged out in stations like Victoria and Paddington to stop them from flooding. And projects like the Bakerloo Line extension, the splitting of the Northern Line, the Croxley Rail Link, Crossrail 2, burying the Hammersmith Flyover, and many others have remained in limbo – for decades in some cases.
Air quality on the Tube is dangerously polluted: the Northern and Victoria Lines have higher average PM2.5 concentrations than the world’s most polluted cities. Some lines like the Central Line are unbearably hot all year round. London Underground, Thameslink, and commuter rail rolling stock is becoming increasingly vandalised with graffiti and uncleaned rubbish.
Since the pandemic, mask-wearing gangs on bikes are stealing phones on an industrial scale – one is snatched every six minutes in London. After decades of steady declines, the murder rate has flatlined for the past ten years. The Evening Standard recently reported that shoplifting (including open, unopposed thefts from shops) rose by 48% in 2023 over the previous year. Many crimes seem to go almost entirely unanswered – not surprising in a city where over 1,000 police officers are on restricted duties.
But the city’s fundamentals are still world-class. A lot of the biggest improvements we think London can make are to do with rules, norms and governance. The institutions that govern life within the bounds of Greater London never seem to live up to the city’s potential. We think there are small tweaks to these that can make big improvements on London’s weaknesses, along with some big, ambitions steps that capitalise on its many strengths. We are bullish on ideas and agency: that ordinary people can improve the city we live in by looking around the world, and into history, and finding ways to make things work better. Right now, Maximum New York, Open New York and GrowSF are all taking different approaches to fixing other global cities. We can do the same.
We are unashamedly pro-growth and pro-building, and want London to be a bigger, richer and even more dynamic city than it is today. And we are optimistic about the potential for technology to fix many of the problems that face us. We want London to be:
A growing city with dense, beautiful, affordable, abundant housing of all kinds and tenures. More people should be able to live in London - we should be excited by a future with twenty million Londoners.
Built to human scale, so people can walk, cycle and get public transport to where they need to be.
For people to live, not just work, with a thriving pub and dining culture which spreads out onto pedestrianised the streets in summer.
Be the safest capital city in the Western world, where people aren’t afraid of crime, no matter where they are or the time of day, with the police working efficiently to catch serious and petty criminals.
A clean, beautiful, verdant and shared space, with parks and squares which everyone can enjoy in peace and quiet, and new buildings that are intended to be beautiful.
A city that embraces new technologies like drone delivery and self-driving cars. London should lead the world in experimentation and adoption of technologies like these, rather than following the pack.
A historic city, where we celebrate the past and live up to its amazing heritage, without treating the whole city like a museum that can never change.
An open city for people of all different backgrounds, and at all different stages of life, from all around Britain and the world.
Most importantly, we don’t have to choose between any of these. London can be all of these at once, and more so, than it is today.
We have some ideas, although they’re not all as fleshed out as we’d like them to be. Some ways we think London could be better are to:
Upzone London to allow housing and offices to be built across the city up to eight stories high.
Create a big pipeline of new Crossrail projects, paid for by building homes and commercial premises around new stations (like in Tokyo and Hong Kong) and capturing some of the land value uplift they create.
Do many more police sting operations to catch phone and bicycle thieves and get them off the streets.
Pedestrianise Oxford Street, the Mall, the rest of the West End, and other parts of Central London.
Expand the Congestion Charge zone and make it dynamic, so it costs more when roads are busy and less when they are quiet, as happens in Singapore.
Stop ‘street scars’ by requiring utility companies to restore dug-up streets to their former states after doing repairs.
Grant more late licences to pubs, bars, restaurants, nightclubs and other nightlife venues, and ignore the objections of residents who moved in after those venues were already there.
Run night services on the Thameslink, Elizabeth Line and other rail lines into London. And aim to run Night Tubes all week long, when demand from more generous licensing laws allows.
Put air filters in Tube stations to filter particulates.
Build a third and fourth runway at Heathrow, or turn Heathrow into a new Canary Wharf, using the proceeds to help pay for a new airport in the Thames Estuary.
Introduce driverless trains on the Tube and expand the South London tram network.
Designate parts of the Thames for wild swimming, particularly in West London, where the currents are far less strong.
Introduce Paris-style “noise cameras”, fine motorists with vehicles that are too loud, and require a licence for buskers or street preachers to use an amplifier in a public place.
Create air channels for drone delivery services, freeing the streets from hundreds of vehicles.
Rebuild the historic Euston station, to a modern scale, so that commuters can arrive in style.
Allow more flexible changes of use between commercial offices and residential homes, with a property tax system that is neutral between those uses.
Reopen many of the police stations that were closed during austerity.
Let restaurants and bars use parking spaces outside their premises for outdoor seating, as has been so successful in New York City.
Legalise driverless taxis like San Francisco has.
Build more bridges across the Thames, including bridges with buildings on them, like the old London Bridge.
Metroise London’s suburban rail network.
Take hundreds of street parking spaces out of Central London, freeing up room for cyclists and pedestrians.
Bury roads like Park Lane, Euston Road, and other busy roads that cut through important central areas.
Let streets opt into adjacent councils for public services like bin collection, to penalise underperforming councils.
Move prisons from central London to the outskirts. Brixton, Pentonville and Wandsworth Prisons sit on some of the most valuable land in the world and could be turned into valuable housing, commercial space, and parkland.
Release Strategic Industrial Land in inner London, some of which is used for things like junk yards and fireplace factories, for other uses.
Build underground ‘superbins’ that avoid the need for each house to have several wheelie bins.
We want your ideas too, as well as your help in finding stuff that’s already great about London that isn’t widely known about yet. We’re planning to start regular meet-ups, both centrally and, with your help, all over London. We’re going to try to run classes for people who want to understand how London actually works, to make solving some of the governance and enterprise problems in the city easier to fix.
Most of all, we’re aiming to be a focal point for people who love London, think it can be even greater, and share our determination that good ideas, made into reality by bright and committed people, can grow the city for the better.
Join us!
– Joe and Sam, on behalf of the Greater London Project.