Centre for London | A Healthy Placemaking Approach for London Bridge: The role of Business Improvement Districts in promoting health and wellbeing

This report creates a healthy placemaking framework which can be used by BIDs to maximise the impact of BIDs placemaking.

Places play a vitally important role in people’s health and wellbeing. Our built and natural environments, our local economies and our social and community infrastructure all have implications for the health and wellbeing of people living and working in local areas.

Placemaking and local health improvement traditionally sit within the remit of local authorities’ core responsibilities. But evidence shows a broad range of local stakeholders have a vital role to play in improving health outcomes through placemaking.

BIDs, Business Improvement Districts, are uniquely positioned to contribute to placemaking in the capital. Indeed, since the first London BID launched in 2004 in Kingston, London’s BIDs have evolved to take on a range of regeneration, place-shaping and planning functions in some of London’s most iconic and populous neighbourhoods’ areas.

In recent years, we’ve seen reductions in funding for local government, affecting both local public health services and wider ‘unprotected’ budgets, such as those for placemaking, leisure and tourism.

It is against this backdrop, and amid stalling progress on London’s persistent health inequalities, that Centre for London partnered with Team London Bridge (TLB) – the BID for the iconic London Bridge area – to explore how to maximise the positive impact of the BID’s placemaking on health and wellbeing.

We drew on the latest evidence on the role of place in influencing health in, as well as best practice in healthy placemaking, to create a Healthy Placemaking Framework that acts a simple and accessible map of the place-based determinants of health and wellbeing that TLB could influence to promote health and wellbeing through their work as BID.

To assess where TLB might go further to impact health and wellbeing within their work as London Bridge’s BID, we mapped how TLB’s current work and future plans interact with the determinants of health and drew on the diverse perspectives of local London Bridge stakeholders and new data on health and wellbeing behaviours amongst people who work and live in the London Bridge area.

To help TLB put these insights into action, we summarised the key findings into an Action Plan to help TLB operationalise a Health-led Placemaking approach, including key deliverables and metrics to measure impact through robust data.

Using the work of Team London Bridge as a case study, this project highlights the unique role and influence of BIDs in placemaking in the capital in the today, and the potential for BIDs to make a unique and positive impact health and wellbeing for London’s residents, workers, and visitors alike.