Harley Street Public Realm Plan

Client Harley Street Medical Area Partnership
Location London, UK
Years 2020 – 2021
Services Wayfinding, Placemaking, Urban Design

Steer developed a visionary public realm plan for the Harley Street Medical Area Partnership (HSMAP). The HSMAP is a newly formed business network will shortly be balloting to become a BID. They wish to  have a public realm action plan to support their vision for the area: to promote Harley Street as an internationally-recognized area of medical healthcare and wellbeing excellence.

The HSMAP’s area sits in the City of Westminster, a densely populated London borough of ~255,000 people resident population, with a high concentration of workers in the Harley Street area, which adjoins London’s West End. The area has a character derived from its heritage buildings, but the public realm is constrained, with narrow sidewalks and no public spaces within the area itself. As a result a key consideration was how to increase space for people walking through and spending time in the area. Other challenges were to: improve connectivity with the surrounding area; make the area more legible; improve bicycle routes; support a greater mix of land use and activity; introduce more street greening; use public realm elements to add local distinctiveness and comfort. 

Working collaboratively with key stakeholders in the area – including large organizations such as several hospitals, key landowners, the City, and the transportation authority- we developed strategies that built-on the area’s existing assets, and would make streets more welcoming, attractive, well-connected, and encourage the celebration of public life and the promotion of wellbeing within the area. The strategies were used to identify short, near and long-term actions which were agreed with the HSMAP. These ranged from small-scale tactical urbanism interventions such as parklets, to traffic circulation changes to deliver new cycle routes, to a major redesign of the street grid to create an innovative ‘superblock’ with a new public space at its heart.