How London Bridge is fighting back against the ‘grotification’ of London
With public finances increasingly unsafe, the private sector has a vital role to play in making streets cleaner, lighter and safer – and London Bridge’s business improvement district is showing how it’s done, says Rob Anderson
Has London got dirtier, darker and more unsafe? As local authority budgets to maintain our high streets, parks and roads have been squeezed in recent years, this is the question policymakers and Londoners alike have asked themselves. Described by Professor Tony Tavers of the LSE as the ‘grotification’ of a city, it conjures up an image of dirty, cluttered streets, poorly lit, unsafe walkways and pollution of all varieties rising.
With one in four Londoners stating they feel pessimistic about London as a whole – according to our recent polling with Savanta – we need to be asking how to ensure our urban environment has a positive impact on those living, working and visiting the city.
London is not yet at this point. However, public finances are stretched to breaking point. However, since 2010, investment in ‘unprotected’ local authority budgets for things like placemaking, leisure and tourism has declined by 55 per cent in real terms. This has a clear impact on local health and wellbeing – from the diminution of community space to the pollution of our streets, Londoners’ physical and mental health is suffering from the sustained squeeze on public services.
In this cash-strapped climate where local authorities must balance tackling emergencies such as our spiralling homelessness crisis with the day-to-day work of maintaining our high streets and parks, the fabric of London’s neighbourhoods needs all the help it can get. Part of the answer may lie in coordinated activity within the private sector – enabled by London’s Business Improvement Districts (BIDs).
The capital is home to roughly 70 Business Improvement Districts (BIDs). The first BID was launched in 2004 in the capital – Kingston to be precise. Since then, they’ve become embedded into our urban infrastructure, working to sustain and improve local business activity. BIDs have relatively stable funding – gaining flexibility and the ability to plan for the future from a levy raised among a dedicated membership base of local businesses. As place-based organisations, they can work co-operatively with local councils and bring local expertise and substantial convening power.
As such, BIDs are uniquely placed to curate healthier and happier local neighbourhoods across London. Our latest report considers the tangible ways BIDs can make a particularly positive, people-centred contribution to the capital. Working in partnership with Team London Bridge, the BID for the bustling, vibrant London Bridge area, we collaborated with a diverse set of organisations to build a new health-led placemaking framework – built to maximise BIDs positive impacts on the health and wellbeing of workers, visitors and residents.
Healthy places
Health and place are fundamentally intertwined, and our health is deeply influenced by where we live, work and enjoy our free time. Our physical, mental and social wellbeing is shaped by having a safe space to exercise, access to healthy food options and whether we feel connected to the community. Environmental factors play their part, with low levels of pollution and access to green space contributing to physical health and happiness. Place also strongly influences economic factors which in turn impact our health, with income, working conditions and experiences of poverty in a given area directly correlating with health outcomes.
Each of these place-based factors play a key role in Londoner’s health and wellbeing. Our research highlights how one in three Londoners are not getting the government recommended 150 minutes of physical activity a week. Despite recent welcome improvements to air quality, roughly seven adults in every 100 had deaths attributable to particulate matter (aka physical air pollution) in London, in comparison to 5.8 across England in 2022. And in 2023, 5 per cent of Londoners are unemployed, higher than the national average of 3.7 per cent.
It is therefore of vital importance that, within each aspect of the place-based determinants of health, BIDs have levers they can pull to positively impact the health and wellbeing of Londoners. Take Team London Bridge as an example – our research highlights how the BID already delivers a range of placemaking initiatives with positive potential impacts on health. Examples include urban greening work and pedestrianisation, BID-funded police officers to reduce crime and increase feelings of safety, as well as new cargo-bike schemes to reduce pollution – the list goes on.
Now, Team London Bridge are expanding on this approach in their 2026-2030 strategy – drawing on our Health-led Placemaking Framework to weave health and wellbeing into the fabric of the London Bridge area. Our research sets out a robust evidence base to guide and shape how Team London Bridge and other BIDs can strategically impact health outcomes, through evidence-driven programmes and community partnerships built to ensure residents, workers and visitors feel comfortable, healthy and connected to their local area.
Returning to where we started with squeezed local budgets – local authority spending on public health has fallen by 28 per cent per person in the last ten years. To return to this level of real-term investment, you’d need a £1.4bn increase every year in local authority spending. In the current climate, that is simply not going to happen.
Embedding a health-led placemaking lens is a dynamic and exciting evolution of what BIDs were set up to be. It’s up to everyone in the city – BIDs, developers and government at all levels – to ensure Londoners can enjoy places that are designed with health and wellbeing at their heart.
Rob Anderson is research director at the Centre for London