Body says public’s visual preferences for residential projects should be considered in upcoming London Plan
The London Assembly has published a letter to the mayor of London urging him to involve local communities early in the design stages of residential developments.
The elected body’s planning and regeneration committee warned of a “growing disconnect” between what Londoners consider to be well-designed housing and what is actually being delivered.
It argued that engaging communities early and taking on board their design preferences would help decrease opposition to planning.
James Small-Edwards, chair of the London Assembly planning and regeneration committee, said: “Londoners are not anti-development, they just want to be engaged early and see homes built that they find visually appealing.
“If we are to deliver 880,000 new homes over the next decade, we must close the gap between what Londoners want and what is getting built.
”Embedding popular design principles and meaningful early engagement will be essential to maintaining public confidence and delivering the homes our city needs.”
The committee has urged the mayor to adopt five recommendations in the next London Plan (2027 – 2050), for which a draft version will be published later this year for consultation.
It proposed updating the London Plan housing design standards to reflect public design preferences.
In a committee meeting in December 2025, Robert Kwolek, senior architectural designer and project manager at think tank Create Streets, reported that around 70% to 80% of people who took part in visual preference surveys preferred buildings with “coherent frontages, clear block structures and human-scaled heights” over “statement” designs.
The London Assembly warned that the current approach to residential development risks “increased local opposition to planning, mounting project costs and undermining local authorities’ ability to deliver the ambitious new homes target of 880,000 over the next ten years.”
London Assembly’s recommendations:
1. The Greater London Authority (GLA) should update the London Plan Housing design standards to embed evidence‑based visual design principles (such as coherent frontages, human‑scale height, contextual materials, and traditional forms) reflecting the disconnect between overwhelming public preferences identified in visual surveys and community research, and what is currently being built.
2. In the new London Plan, the GLA should promote the use of design codes by councils that are created in close conjunction with a broad range of local residents (who are paid for their time to ensure representation is broad).
3. The GLA should, through the new London Plan, promote the development of neighbourhood plans that positively detail what design of buildings would be welcomed by local communities.
4. The GLA should produce a pan-London evidence-based report from its partnerships with the London Housing Panel’s Community Conversations and UCL Bartlett School’s Citizen Science Academy by August 2026 to inform its approach to future building and place design. This should include visual preference studies to establish the built form, materials, typology, style and streets Londoners prefer, with the results being published.
5. The GLA should require boroughs to embed structured early-stage engagement (deliberative workshops, co‑design methods, upstream policy engagement) in major schemes, supported by GLA guidance on resourcing and best practice.
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