What was the Greater London Council?
The Greater London Council (GLC) was the largest local government body in the world for over 20 years before its dissolution by Margaret Thatcher in 1986. Like its predecessor the London County Council, the GLC existed to provide London with a powerful ‘top-tier’ of local government, and as a result it had an often uncomfortable relationship with both the newly established local boroughs and with central government.
The GLC was for some time responsible for London’s transport and the main road system; it took care of parks and public buildings, administered wide-ranging social policies and recreation programmes, was a major housing provider and had substantial planning powers. Not only was the GLC responsible for the creation of a city-wide plan (Tomorrow’s London) which broadly sought to determine the nature and extent of London’s urban growth, but it also had considerable powers when it came to granting planning permission, and in actively facilitating and overseeing the redevelopment of vast expanses of the urban realm as a planning authority in its own right. By the same token, the GLC was a crucial agent in mediating which parts of the city – from individual buildings, to whole streets and entire areas – would withstand the modernising impulse to sweep away the past and begin again.
The political leadership changed frequently. Today the GLC is usually associated with the antagonistic ‘new left’ administration of Ken Livingstone in the 1980s, but previous councils had alternated between Labour and the Conservatives. To what extent this political fluctuation informed the GLC’s engagement with processes of redevelopment and conservation throughout the period is something that this project aims to uncover – as vastly more numerous and arguably more powerful than the elected politicians were the workers who made up the ranks of the bureaucracy. These often long-serving members of staff had a comprehensive handle on the production and dissemination of information and policy, and knew better than any how to work the immense and labyrinthine bureaucratic system to a particular advantage. They were often able to successfully pursue their own agendas, which were informed by dominant ideas within their professions, their allegiance to particular factions within the GLC, and their ties to professional and commercial bodies and communities.
Tomorrow's London 