The Story of LPAC
The brief
The Story of LPAC is a digital project led by Nicky Gavron to document the history and legacy of the London Planning Advisory Committee (LPAC). Active between 1986–2000, LPAC played a quiet but influential role in shaping London’s planning policy.
Nicky Gavron joined the Committee as lead member for Haringey in 1988 and became the Labour lead member in 1989. She would go on to become Chair in 1994.
Nicky sadly passed away in 2024, but in the last few years of her life she was determined to find a way to tell the story of LPAC and its influence on the London of the 2000s — a story she felt had been overlooked by academics, researchers and commentators. At the heart of this project is her extensive archive of more than 5,000 reports, policy papers and personal communications.
This website sets out to tell the story of LPAC’s role in the establishment of London as the pre‑eminent global city of the first part of the twenty‑first century. It needed to act as a digital archive, storytelling platform and reference point for the public, academics and professionals interested in LPAC’s work, bringing scattered material into a single, accessible home.
The challenge
This was not a typical organisational website. The project needed to honour a complex planning history, a large personal archive and a very specific point of view.
Key challenges included:
Turning dense planning history into something approachable
LPAC’s work spans policies, reports and debates that can be difficult to navigate without context.
Balancing narrative and archive
The site had to work both as a story told through Nicky’s eyes and as a reference tool for researchers and practitioners.
Serving different audiences
Planners, academics, students and curious Londoners all needed different ways into the material.
Designing an information structure from scratch
There was no existing digital taxonomy; we had to decide how best to group themes, time periods and document types.
The site also needed to be flexible enough to grow as more material is digitised or new perspectives are added over time.
The approach
We began by mapping the core strands of the story: LPAC’s role in London’s planning, key themes in its work, and Nicky’s perspective as both participant and narrator.
On the content and structure side, we:
- Defined clear story chapters to guide readers through LPAC’s work over time
- Created themes and topics to group related policies, projects and debates
- Designed archive entries for individual documents, images and references
- Introduced contextual copy and signposting so visitors are never dropped into material without a sense of why it matters
On the design and build side, we:
- Kept the visual language calm and typographic, letting the content lead
- Built flexible WordPress templates for stories, timelines and archive items
- Added simple filtering and cross‑linking so users can move between narrative and source material without getting lost
Throughout, the aim was to make the site feel like a carefully edited book you can browse at your own pace, rather than a static document dump.
The outcome
The Story of LPAC website gives this overlooked chapter in London’s planning history a permanent, accessible home.
For visitors, the site makes it possible to:
- Understand who LPAC were and why their work mattered
- Follow the story of London’s planning through key moments and themes
- Dive into specific documents, images and references when they need more detail
For the project team and Nicky’s collaborators, it provides:
- A structured way to continue adding material from her archive
- A single reference point to share with researchers, students and practitioners
- A platform that can support talks, teaching and further work on LPAC’s legacy
The result is a digital archive that reflects both the seriousness of the subject and the care Nicky brought to documenting it.
The Story of LPAC
Location
Year
Industry
Services
Website design
Website development
Content structure & templates
Credits
Commissioned by the family of Nicky Gavron
WordPress
Louise Rankin
Louise Rankin
Richard Derecki