Campaign to make London a national park city launches competition

The campaign to make London a National Park City has announced a competition to help people imagine how the capital would look and feel if it were a national park city

Artists, urban designers, film-makers, architects, cartographers and others are being invited to enter a competition to help Londoners imagine their city if it were to become a national park. Those at the London National Park City initiative are seeking ‘ambitious and creative entries with the potential to transform how Londoners engage with the natural world’.

Judges, including the author Will Self as well as expert ecologists and urban designers, will select the most exciting images to be featured in Time Out London magazine. The deadline for entries is 19 May and winners will be announced on 5 June.

Daniel Raven-Ellison, guerrilla geographer and coordinator of the campaign, said: “We want to attract the best ideas for transforming the quality of life in London by making it a national park city. We’d love to see visionary ideas not just for new developments, but which re-imagine London’s current cityscape. Ideas can be small-scale and design in tiny changes that will have a big impact on Londoners’ lives, or they could be large scale, imagining changes to streetscapes, neighbourhoods, or the whole watershed.”

Raven-Ellison said he wanted designers to ‘do what they do best’ to imagine a greener city, in which residents make decisions about how best to improve their environments, as well as enjoy urban nature and wildlife.

We’d love to see visionary ideas not just for new developments, but which re-imagine London’s current cityscape

“It’s not just about the green though,” he added. “We’d like people to take a look at the London National Park City website and then let their imaginations go to work. Be bold, be brilliant!”

The campaign to make London a national park city, which was launched in 2014, aims to transform London’s habitat. It considers gardens, streets, rivers, buildings and parks as one landscape and wants the natural world to be integrated ‘more fully into urban life’. The campaign’s vision includes protecting and improving existing parks, green and wild spaces to ensure that all Londoners have easy and free access to high-quality green space, boosting the capital’s biodiversity, and also addressing how the built environment itself can achieve these aims.

For more information and to enter visit www.nationalparkcity.london/imagine

Image: Luke Massey and the Greater London National Park City Initiative


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