London: Mobility City by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen & Jake Nunley

Rail lines, tunnels, a revamped Underground, and bigger, better 
airports were decisive in London’s transformation into one of the 
world’s great global centres. Direct project loans from the 
European Investment Bank worth £7.3 billion between 2006 
and 2016 have also been of fundamental importance.

Despite the uncertainties of Brexit, London continues to be rated as a leading location in Europe and the world 
for business, knowledge, and talent. It is routinely benchmarked among the top performing large cities globally 
in terms of quality of life, infrastructure and accessibility. 
But 30 years ago, when London had no citywide government, a transport system in crisis, and no successful track 
record of continuous large-scale upgrades to the urban fabric, this scenario would have seemed highly unlikely. 
In this essay we examine how London’s unpromising 1980s gave rise to three decades of reinvestment and we 
explain how the European Investment Bank played an essential catalytic role in successive cycles of London’s 
evolution from an under-governed de-populating national capital into a diverse global centre benefiting from 
integrated urban systems management.

London’s development: the back story (1945 to 1985)

The 40 years between 1945 and 1985 saw London take several steps to reorient its spatial and economic composition 
in accordance with new global political and economic trends.

Following World War II, with extensive derelict areas in the city, London had an opportunity to amend the perceived 
failings of unplanned and haphazard development that had occurred as a result of rapid industrialisation over 
the course of the nineteenth century. With over 50,000 inner London homes having been completely destroyed 
and more than 2 million having experienced at least some form of bomb damage, the London County Council 
(LCC) was presented with a unique chance to plan and rebuild vacant parts of the city on a scale not witnessed 
since the Great Fire of London almost three centuries prior.
In 1944, the Greater London Plan (“The Abercrombie Plan”) pointed out the main directions for the development 
and reconstruction of the city. Founded on the realities of industrial dispersal and a stable population with low 
levels of growth, the plan demanded not only the creation of large-scale affordable housing, including tower 
blocks, but also the dispersal and relocation of populations into New Towns beyond a newly established metropolitan 
green belt.
 By the mid-1960s, London had witnessed the creation of eight satellite New Towns, a viable green 
belt, and more than 1,000 high-rise blocks of flats scattered across the urban fabric.
Moreover, the emergence of several significant and enduring phenomena signaled that London had reached the 
end of this first cycle of post-war development. The “leapfrog” of development over the green belt had seen New 
Towns become heavily dominated by commuter living, while high-rise blocks had begun to decay, physically and 
socially. Moreover, London’s inner-city boroughs had begun to witness rapid depopulation, as white working-class 
inhabitants started to migrate to distant suburbs or adjacent counties in search of a better quality of life and new 
job opportunities.
In this context, where deindustrialisation, urban blight and land contamination hit London hard, urban redevelopment 
(or renewal) gradually came to be identified as the task of re-engineering the city for new forms of economic 
activity and job creation. It was increasingly accepted that economic activity had to be re-galvanised on sites 
where it had declined most, namely in the rapidly deindustrialising waterfront areas in the east and south of the 
city that had suffered due to the movement of cargo to deeper ports in Tilbury and Folkestone. Infrastructure 
interventions came to be seen as an initial solution to these imbalances, helping to concentrate development in 
the east of the city and offset the traditional advantages of the west. But the city’s governance arrangements, still 
based on the geographically constrained London County Council (usually known as “inner London”), were not up 
to the task.
In 1965, the Greater London Council (GLC) was created to address London’s fragmented and uncoordinated local 
government and deliver on the need for new infrastructure development. Replacing the LCC, the GLC became 
responsible for running strategic services such as waste disposal and emergency planning, and shared responsibility 
with London boroughs for providing roads, housing, planning and leisure services. The GLC was also required to 
produce a Greater London Development Plan.
A draft Development Plan was published in 1969 and approved in 1976.
 In contrast to the Greater London Plan 
of 1944, this Development Plan focused on inner-London regeneration, assumed a decline in population, and 
established clearly defined density limits.
 A key focus of the plan was the regeneration and comprehensive 
redevelopment of Covent Garden and the creation of a central London motorway loop in order to enhance 
connectivity to the suburbs. Following the movement of the Covent Garden market to Nine Elms, the GLC proposed 
the construction of a new road system through the area, which would involve demolishing over three-quarters 
of the area’s homes to make space for new and more expensive flats. Residents and community groups met the 
proposal with criticism. As a result, the plan ultimately became mired in controversy and dispute.
In 1961, the UK had applied to join the European Economic Community. It became a member in 1973, a situation 
that was then ratified in a 1975 referendum won by 67% to 33%. 
In 1981, the Labour Party took control of the GLC and pledged to implement an interventionist Industrial Strategy
capable of producing 10,000 jobs by 1985. This was a direct response to the massive scale of the decline in the 
city’s manufacturing base that had been occurring since the 1960s. Between 1959 and 1975, the rate of manufacturing 
job loss in London was more than double that in other UK conurbations put together. In the decade from 1971-81 
Greater London lost 36% of its manufacturing employment compared to 25% nationally.

London: Mobility City by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen & Jake Nunley