Greater London Council

Based on Wikipedia: Greater London Council

The Council That Saved London From Itself

In the 1960s, a group of ambitious planners nearly drove three motorways straight through the heart of London. They called it the London Ringways scheme, and it would have demolished thirty thousand homes to solve the city's traffic problems "once and for all." The men behind this vision sat in a grand Victorian building called County Hall, perched on the South Bank of the Thames, directly across the river from Parliament. They worked for something called the Greater London Council, or GLC.

The GLC lasted just twenty-one years. In that brief span, it became one of the most controversial and consequential governing bodies in British history. It built social housing towers that are now protected architectural landmarks. It constructed the Thames Barrier, which has saved the city from flooding over a hundred times. And in its final years, it waged open political warfare against the sitting Prime Minister, posting embarrassing unemployment statistics on billboards visible from the Houses of Parliament.

The story of the Greater London Council is really the story of how a modern city governs itself—and what happens when that government becomes too politically inconvenient to survive.

The Problem of Governing a Sprawling Metropolis

Before 1965, London's government was a patchwork. The London County Council, established back in 1889, had authority over what we now call Inner London—roughly the dense urban core surrounding the City of London. But by the mid-twentieth century, the metropolis had sprawled far beyond these Victorian boundaries. Suburbs stretched into Essex, Kent, Surrey, and Middlesex. The entirety of Middlesex, in fact, had been swallowed by London's growth, transforming from a county of villages and market towns into a continuous urban landscape.

This created an absurd administrative situation. A Londoner living in Croydon was subject to Surrey County Council, even though Croydon was indistinguishable from the surrounding city. Someone in East Ham answered to Essex, despite the fact that the neighborhood was as thoroughly urban as anywhere in the old County of London. Public transport, roads, housing—these required coordination across the entire metropolitan area, but no single authority existed to provide it.

In 1957, the government established a Royal Commission under Sir Edwin Herbert to sort out this mess. Herbert's commission spent three years studying the problem and concluded that London needed a new tier of government covering the entire built-up area. They proposed fifty-two new London boroughs as the primary units of local government, overseen by a strategic authority that would handle transport, major roads, and large-scale planning.

The government accepted most of these recommendations, though it reduced the number of boroughs to thirty-two. The new Greater London would encompass all of the old County of London, most of Middlesex, and chunks of Essex, Kent, Surrey, and even a small piece of Hertfordshire. Several independent county boroughs—Croydon, East Ham, and West Ham—would be absorbed into the new structure.

Not everyone was eager to join. Some areas on the proposed boundaries feared higher taxes and lobbied successfully to stay out. Chigwell in Essex managed to avoid incorporation, as did Sunbury-on-Thames, Staines, and Potters Bar. Other areas like Epsom, Esher, and Weybridge were recommended for inclusion but never joined. The boundaries of Greater London, in other words, were shaped as much by political resistance as by urban geography.

A Curious Electoral Pattern

The first GLC election took place on April 9, 1964, a full year before the council actually assumed its powers. This early election produced an interesting result: Labour won sixty-four seats to the Conservatives' thirty-six. Bill Fiske became the first Leader of the Council.

What happened next established a pattern that would hold for every single GLC election ever held. Whichever party controlled the national government would lose the GLC election. Every time.

In 1967, with a Labour government in Westminster, the Conservatives swept to power in County Hall with a crushing eighty-two seats to Labour's eighteen. Desmond Plummer became Conservative leader. In 1970, with Conservatives now governing nationally, the Conservatives retained the GLC but with a reduced majority. In 1973, Harold Wilson's Labour was back in opposition nationally, so naturally Labour won the GLC.

This pattern reflected something fundamental about the GLC's political role. It became a platform for opposition, a place where the party out of power nationally could demonstrate its electoral viability and criticize the sitting government. County Hall's location—staring directly across the Thames at Parliament—made this symbolism unavoidable.

The Aldermen of County Hall

The GLC inherited an archaic feature from its predecessor: aldermen. These were not directly elected by voters. Instead, the elected councillors chose them, at a ratio of one alderman for every six councillors. Initially, there were sixteen aldermen alongside a hundred councillors.

The system had byzantine rules. In 1964, half the aldermen were elected for three-year terms and half for six-year terms, staggering their service. Every few years, the council would elect a new batch. In 1973, when the number of councillors was reduced to ninety-two, the aldermen were cut to fifteen.

This institution didn't survive the 1970s. The post of alderman was abolished in 1976, taking effect from the 1977 election. The aldermen elected in 1970 had their terms extended to seven years to see them out; those elected in 1973 had their terms shortened to four. It was a tidy end to a relic of Victorian municipal government.

Dreams of Concrete and Speed

The GLC was legally required to produce something called the Greater London Development Plan. This wasn't just a zoning document—it was meant to be a comprehensive vision for the city's future, covering population changes, employment, housing, pollution, transport, roads, green spaces, and public services.

The planners were ambitious. They proposed the comprehensive redevelopment of Covent Garden, then a working fruit and vegetable market, not yet the tourist destination it would become. More dramatically, they envisioned a central London motorway loop—a ring of high-speed roads cutting through the inner city.

This was the Ringways scheme. Three motorways would encircle London at different distances from the center. Ringway One would cut through neighborhoods close to central London. Ringway Two would arc through middle-ring suburbs. The outer ring, Ringway Three, would loop through the metropolitan fringes.

The Westway opened in 1970, hailed as a vision of the future. This elevated motorway sliced through North Kensington on massive concrete pillars, carrying traffic above the rooftops. It still exists today, and you can still see the scars it left on the neighborhoods it bisected—the brutalist columns rising above Victorian terraces, the dark spaces beneath the roadway.

But the Westway was as far as the urban motorway vision got. The plan required an inquiry that lasted from July 1970 to May 1972—nearly two years of examination. The campaign to save Covent Garden from redevelopment gained momentum. Opposition to the motorways grew fierce. Thirty thousand homes would need to be demolished.

The outer ring was eventually approved and opened in 1986 as the M25 motorway—the famous "orbital" that now circles Greater London. But the inner rings were killed by public opposition in the 1980s. London was left on a more human scale than it might have been. It was also left with what one might politely call an eternally unsolved traffic problem.

Building for the Future, Whether They Liked It or Not

After World War Two, large areas of London remained derelict from German bombing. Much of the housing that had survived was squalid and overcrowded, the legacy of Victorian slum development. The GLC had new powers to address this crisis, and it used them to build housing on an ambitious scale.

The approach was controversial. The council wanted to relocate Londoners from dilapidated inner-city neighborhoods to new developments in the suburbs or satellite towns beyond the metropolitan boundary. The residents of those receiving areas often resisted, fearing the influx of inner-city populations.

Some of what the GLC built has become architecturally celebrated. Balfron Tower in Tower Hamlets, completed in 1967, is a brutalist high-rise designed by Ernö Goldfinger. Its sister building, Trellick Tower in North Kensington, finished in 1972, follows the same design principles. Both are now Grade II* listed buildings, meaning they're considered particularly important buildings of more than special interest—one of the higher levels of heritage protection in England.

This is a peculiar trajectory. Buildings that were once symbols of urban planning overreach, of an arrogant council imposing its vision on working-class communities, are now protected as architectural treasures. Whether this represents a genuine reassessment of their quality or simply the passage of enough time for brutalism to become fashionable again is a matter of perspective.

Holding Back the River

The GLC's most enduring physical legacy isn't a tower block or a motorway. It's a massive steel barrier stretching across the Thames at Woolwich, designed to protect London from tidal surges.

London has always been vulnerable to flooding. The city sits on a tidal estuary, and the land beneath it is slowly sinking—a geological process called post-glacial rebound, as the northern parts of Britain, relieved of their ice age burden, rise while the southern parts sink in compensation. Sea levels are rising too. A major tidal surge could send the Thames pouring over its banks and into the streets of central London.

In 1953, a catastrophic North Sea flood killed over two thousand people in the Netherlands and over three hundred in England. This disaster prompted serious discussion about protecting London from a similar fate. But it took until the 1970s for construction to actually begin.

The Thames Barrier was built between 1974 and 1982 at a cost of 534 million pounds—a staggering sum for the time. Some critics called it a vanity project, questioning whether the expense was justified. Time has answered that question decisively. The barrier was raised thirty-five times in the 1990s. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was raised seventy-five times. As sea levels continue to rise, those numbers will only increase.

The barrier remains the second-largest movable flood barrier in the world, after the Maeslantkering in the Netherlands. When a surge approaches, the massive steel gates—each one taller than a five-story building—rotate up from the riverbed to form a continuous wall across the Thames. The technology is elegant in its simplicity: the gates rest on the bottom normally, allowing ships to pass, and swing up when needed.

The Fares Fair Fiasco

In 1981, the GLC came under the control of Ken Livingstone, and London politics entered a new and turbulent phase.

Livingstone's ascent was itself dramatic. He was a left-wing councillor who had been defeated in a leadership contest the previous year by the moderate Andrew McIntosh. But the Labour left had organized carefully at the constituency level, ensuring their members were selected to stand in the 1981 election. When Labour won a narrow victory—a majority of just six seats—the new councillors met the day after the election and voted out McIntosh in favor of Livingstone, thirty votes to twenty.

The Conservative campaign had actually predicted this would happen. They warned voters that a vote for Labour was really a vote for Livingstone, that McIntosh would be deposed after the election. McIntosh and Labour Party leader Michael Foot insisted this was untrue.

It was true.

Livingstone's administration immediately launched a policy called Fares Fair. The idea was simple: reduce fares on the Tube and buses using government subsidies, making public transport more affordable and reducing car use. The GLC would raise money through the rates—the local property tax—and use it to subsidize ticket prices.

Bromley Council, a Conservative-controlled outer London borough, took the GLC to court. Bromley argued that its residents, who had no Tube stations and limited bus service, were being forced to subsidize transport for inner London. The case went to the House of Lords, which ruled against the GLC. The policy was unlawful.

The defeat was humiliating but instructive. It demonstrated the limits of what the GLC could actually do, hemmed in as it was by both national government and the courts. It also made Livingstone a nationally recognized political figure—the face of opposition to Thatcher's government.

Billboards and Provocation

County Hall sits on the South Bank of the Thames, its facade facing directly across the river to the Palace of Westminster. Every day, Members of Parliament walking along the Embankment would have a clear view of the GLC's headquarters.

Ken Livingstone exploited this geography. He erected a billboard on the side of County Hall displaying London's unemployment figures. As the numbers rose under Margaret Thatcher's economic policies, the billboard was updated. Parliament couldn't look across the river without being confronted with the human cost of government policy—or at least the GLC's interpretation of it.

This was politics as spectacle, and Livingstone excelled at it. He met with Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin at a time when Adams was banned from entering Great Britain due to his connections with the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He pursued high-spend socialist policies that were anathema to the Conservative government. The tabloid press dubbed him "Red Ken."

Livingstone's deputy leader from 1985 to 1986 was John McDonnell, who would later become Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Jeremy Corbyn. The GLC of this era was a training ground for the British left's future leadership.

The Government Strikes Back

By 1983, the Thatcher government had decided that the GLC had to go. The official argument was efficiency: the council was unnecessary, and its functions could be carried out better by the individual boroughs. A White Paper titled "Streamlining the Cities" made the case.

Critics saw the real motivation as political. The GLC had become a powerful platform for opposition to the government. County Hall, with its prominent position across from Parliament, was a constant thorn in Thatcher's side. Abolishing the council would eliminate a significant source of organized resistance—and remove that embarrassing unemployment billboard.

Livingstone and three other Labour councillors resigned in protest, forcing by-elections in September 1984. They won their seats back easily because the Conservatives refused to stand candidates. It was a symbolic gesture of defiance, but it couldn't stop what was coming.

The Local Government Act 1985 abolished the GLC, along with the metropolitan county councils that governed England's other major conurbations outside London. The act faced considerable opposition but passed Parliament. The GLC's end date was set for March 31, 1986. The elections scheduled for May 1985 were cancelled—the councillors elected in 1981 would simply serve until abolition.

The Aftermath

The GLC's assets were transferred to something called the London Residuary Body for disposal. County Hall itself was sold to a Japanese entertainment company. Today it houses the London Aquarium, the London Dungeon, and other tourist attractions—a somewhat ignominious fate for a building that once governed eight million people.

The Inner London Education Authority, which had been responsible for schools in the former County of London, survived abolition by a few years. Direct elections to it were held for the first time. But the ILEA was finally disbanded in 1990, and the Inner London boroughs assumed control of their schools, just as the outer boroughs had done since 1965.

Most GLC powers devolved to the boroughs. Some functions, like the fire service, were taken over by joint boards made up of councillors appointed by the boroughs. In total, around a hundred different organizations ended up responsible for service delivery in Greater London. The simplification that the government had promised turned out to be anything but simple.

London spent fourteen years without a unified metropolitan government. When Tony Blair's Labour government came to power in 1997, it was committed to bringing back London-wide governance. A 1998 referendum approved the creation of a new Greater London Authority and an elected mayor by a two-to-one margin.

Ken Livingstone, the last effective leader of the GLC, ran for Mayor of London in 2000. The Labour Party tried to block his candidacy, selecting Frank Dobson as their official candidate instead. Livingstone ran as an independent and won. He was readmitted to the Labour Party and won again in 2004. After all those years, the man who had used County Hall to wage war on the government was back in charge of London—this time from a new headquarters at City Hall.

The Ghost of Roads Not Built

There's a curious footnote to the Ringways story. In 1983, the GLC considered investing 230,000 pounds in something called the Lucas rail-bus—a vehicle that could run on both roads and railway tracks. The concept had been developed by workers at Lucas Aerospace in the 1970s, and a prototype had been built from a second-hand Bristol bus in 1980-81.

The appeal was economic: you could cut costs on rail vehicle production by integrating bus parts. The challenges were significant: what happens when a light road vehicle collides with a much heavier train? How do you supervise the transition from road to rail?

Nothing came of it. The GLC was abolished before any serious development could proceed. But it's a reminder that the council was thinking creatively about London's transport problems, even in its final years—and that some of those ideas might have been worth pursuing.

Today, the Thames Barrier still protects London. Trellick Tower and Balfron Tower still house residents, now as desirable addresses rather than symbols of planning excess. The M25 is notoriously congested, a circle of frustration around the capital. And the inner-city motorways that would have torn through Islington and Hackney and Camden were never built.

The GLC's legacy is paradoxical. Its greatest achievements were things it built: the barrier, the towers, the transport improvements. Its greatest service to London may have been its failures—the roads not demolished, the neighborhoods not destroyed. Sometimes the best thing a government can do is stop itself from doing what it planned.