When a hub is not a hub

Launched yesterday the Mayor's proposals for the London Plan give an indication how the Spatial Development Strategy for London is likely to develop in the future. Economically this comes at a tricky time when it would be easy to be distracted while getting used to the "new normal" - as Lee Shostak has correctly termed where we are now.

The sub-regional conundrum continues.  Despite abandoning a rather peculiar sub-regional division of London that removed central London (the so called pizza slices and about as memorable) the new sub-regional split puts Tower Hamlets and therefore Canary Wharf in East London.  I'm not sure any of the occupiers of Canary Wharf, which is more Manhattan than anywhere else in London, see themselves as anything else but a (better) part of the Central Activity Zone.

The proposals also give some indication of the emerging policy for Outer London and the impact of the Mayor's Commission in getting a greater a better deal for the suburbs.  The mooted hubs (and at one point super hubs) have become "strategic Outer London development centres".  This is probably due to the existence of the fairly elaborate town centre hierarchy in London and how different the four suggested potential hubs locations are.  

The loosely defined Heathrow area is a very specialised and enormous airport economy. It is also congested so there is little appetite for increased development. Brent Cross is currently a regional shopping centre that if bolted together with Cricklewood could, on paper at least, become a Metropolitan Centre. Despite being a "pillar" of the London economy and touted as the seventh largest "city" in the UK, Croydon has been losing employment for the last 15 to 20 years to growing centres outside the Green Belt and has a mediocre office stock. Which leaves Stratford. With its vast development potential and planned investment, Stratford probably is closest to having the capacity to become a hub, genuinely grow jobs on the back of its proximity to the Central Activity Zone and have a real "polycentric" or spatial economic impact on the London economy.  By avoiding a "one size fits all" approach to developing these strategic Outer London development centres the Mayor is accepting the extent of these differences.  Though, on the flip side, the danger of allowing limitless local flexibility could leave people asking exactly what the plans are.  It is a tricky balance.