Reflections of Businessldn's West End Streets Steering Group
Dan Johnson
Founder of Placemaking London and a Founding Partner of AttisTowns
Under the guidance of Businessldn’s West End Streets Steering Group (West), many of the capital’s public spaces and iconic thoroughfares have been transformed.
Through the sponsorship of three priority public realm projects at a time, the private sector led organisation has galvanised a series of successful private-public partnerships to finance and deliver better public spaces across London’s West End.
It is worth noting the scale of the achievement, delivering over £140m investment and improving five kilometres of the West End’s roads. Celebrating past success is also an opportunity to look to the future and how WESt can continue to support the transformation of London’s public realm. There will be three areas in which public spaces will need to be designed to perform even better: sustainable travel, climate emergency and adding social value.
While the primary focus of WESt-sponsored projects has been to create better places, designers and transport planners have also worked diligently to design in better provision for safe and active travel. Expectations of future public realm schemes will be even higher, with the need to design in better protection and priority for cyclists. This can be achieved elegantly, without detrimentally affecting the aesthetic of London’s world-renowned public spaces and streets.
Public realm schemes will also have to contribute to addressing the climate emergency. Climate experts advise that governments and the global community are already too late to fully mitigate against climate change, despite recent international agreements, declarations of climate emergency, net zero carbon pathways and strong leadership from the business community. Consequently, places will also need to adapt and build in resilience. This means the next generation of public realm schemes will have to factor in protection from heat and flood mitigation such as sustainable urban drainage.
Investing in public realm projects can make a direct contribution to corporate ESGobjectives, in particular increasing social value. Emerging public realm schemes will need to demonstrate their added social value, which is the positive value they can create for communities and society. The pipeline of proposals to improve London streetscapes include Heart of London Business Alliance’s carefully selected programme of ambitious yet deliverable public realm, cycling and walking schemes, which can be seen at www.westend2027.com. With backing from the WESt Group, which is sponsoring schemes to improve St Martin’s Lane and Charing Cross Road, an alliance of public, private, stakeholder and resident support has been assembled. These projects will add value to London, as demonstrated by their impressive benefit-cost analyses, which respectively are 15:1 and 12:1.
Over the last decade central London traffic levels have fallen, from 1.1m vehicles a day in 2010 to 874,000 in 2021; and the post-Covid trend seems to remain downward[i]. This suggests London can be bold in seeking further opportunities to reallocate road space from traffic, to create better public spaces and cycling and walking routes. These ought to include Brompton Road and Park Lane. Traffic-dominated Park Lane severs Hyde Park from Mayfair and the rest of the West End; and has not been designed to efficiently use its up to 60 metre width, which includes inaccessible green space that is four times larger than Trafalgar Square.
Brompton Road is designated one of London’s two International Centres, yet primarily functions as a through traffic route from the west and Heathrow to the West End. Brompton Road deserves the scale of vision and investment that London’s closest competitor city is giving to the Champs-Elysees[ii].
The role of the BusinessLDN WESt group in forging new public-private partnerships and leadership is as vital as ever to ensure our public spaces are relevant to today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities, underlying the global reputation that London remains one of the best places in the world to live, work, visit and invest.
[i] Travel In London Report 15, Table 6.2 and Fig 6.2.
[ii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pplyJ-Mc-8U
