City of London Chief Planning Officer Gwyn Richards Exposed As A Political Poodle

In a previous post, we drew attention to the fact that the City council’s Chief Planning Officer, Gwyn Richards, had approved a new application for the redevelopment of 81 Newgate Street, the former BT headquarters which is now to be the headquarters of HSBC, in only 11 weeks over the summer holiday season last year and without bringing the application to the Planning  Committee. We also quoted a comment made by the Chair of Policy (= leader of the council), Chris Hayward, in a recent interview with the Financial Times in which he told City planning officers to “make it [the planning process] work for” developers – i.e. say “yes” to their applications.

Alder Sue Pearson raised both matters in a question that she put to Richards in a meeting of the Planning Committee on 5/3/24. We set out below her question and Richards’ response, which was shocking even by the low standards of the City council.

At 1:14:03 in the meeting, Pearson asked:

“Will the Chief Planning Officer please explain:

(1) which provision under the Scheme of Delegations he relied upon in granting planning permission for a new application last July for the redevelopment of 81 Newgate Street, which is obviously an application of “broad interest”, instead of bringing that application to committee, as he did for the previous [application] for the same development four years ago; and

(2) whether he accepts direction from the Chair of Policy, who was recently quoted in the Financial Times as saying that: “I always say to my planning officers: remember …these [developers] are our clients, they are the people who are investing, taking the risk investing in our city. And we have to make it work for them”.

I would just say that I first heard about this application and the decision to grant permission when I read about it on the blog site Reclaim EC1. I could find nothing other than when I looked back in papers [i.e. reports from officers to the planning committee] – it was actually the November paper that said there was an application, and that was after it had been approved.”

The Scheme of Delegations to which Pearson referred provides that elected members of the City council delegate power to the Chief Planning Officer “to determine applications for… full… planning permission… subject to the applications: 
– being in accordance with policy,
– not being of broad interest and
– there being no more than 9 planning objections.

Alder Sue Pearson: asking the right questions.

An application must satisfy all three of those criteria for the Chief Planning Officer to have delegated power to determine the application himself rather than bring it to committee for decision. That is unambiguous: the criteria are linked by the word “and”, not “or”. That has also been the council’s invariable practice. Applications of very narrow interest have been brought to committee because the number of objections exceeded the threshold, whereas matters of broad interest have been brought to committee in the absence of any objections. This makes perfect sense: applications of broad interest should be determined by elected members, and others – for the sake of practicality – should be determined under delegated authority unless they are controversial, as evidenced by the number of objections, in which case they should also be determined by elected members.

The application for the redevelopment of 81 Newgate Street made in July 2023 was for “full” planning permission. As Pearson said, it was obviously an application of broad interest. It concerned the redevelopment of a very large building, occupying a whole block, at a strategic junction in the City. Its site is opposite St Paul’s Cathedral. The previous application for this redevelopment was brought to committee in 2020 because it was of such broad interest that it was unthinkable that the committee would not determine it. A particular focus of the committee’s consideration was the public benefit that would have been provided by a publicly accessible roof terrace with a view of St Paul’s.

Since the new application, from which that public benefit was removed, was equally of broad interest, it fell outside the delegated authority of the Chief Planning Officer to determine himself. Whether this application accorded with policy or attracted objections was irrelevant, since if one of the criteria for delegation was not fulfilled, there could be no delegation.

In spite of this, the Chief Planning Officer, Gwyn Richards, determined the application himself. He also acted with unseemly haste: the application was made in July 2023, and he granted permission in September 2023, although the intervening period of 11 weeks fell entirely within the summer holiday season. This meant there was less opportunity for people to object.

By sliding this application under the committee’s radar, Richards was evidently accepting direction from his political master, the Chair of Policy, Chris Hayward, whom Pearson quoted in the second part of her question as directing planning officers to make developers’ applications “work for them”  – i.e. to say “yes”. Hayward even referred to this particular development in his interview with the Financial Times. What easier way for Richards to obey his master’s voice than to say “yes” himself instead of taking the risk that a few members of the committee would ask awkward questions about the removal of public benefit that featured so strongly in the consideration of the original application.

Chief Planning Officer, Gwyn Richards: no right answers. He’s seen here addressing the City Property Association, a developers’ forum, saying what they want to hear. He never does that with the City’s other “stakeholders”, like residents or heritage bodies. But you’re supposed to follow the spin – “we treat all our stakeholders with fairness and impartiality. They’re all equally important to us as valued customers” – not the facts.

On the facts, and according to the only feasible interpretation of the Scheme of Delegations, the answers to Pearson’s questions had to be that Richards determined the new application without authority and was accepting direction from Hayward to say “yes” to all major office developments including this one. As we pointed out in our previous post, he has for years been writing reports which recommend the approval of applications for major office developments that gush with enthusiasm, even more than the developers’ own marketing brochures.

But City officers never admit they are wrong, even if they obviously are. Richards replied to Pearson’s first question by saying that the new application did not need to be brought to committee because it was not of broad interest. That’s as shocking as saying it’s a dry and sunny day outside the Guildhall when everyone inside can see and hear rain pelting on the windows. But truth has no currency in the culture of the Guildhall, either among the political establishment or the senior officers appointed to do their bidding. Such is the degree of moral corruption there that saying things which everyone knows not to be true, and which couldn’t possibly be true, passes unremarked by most members.

This is evidenced by the lack of response to Richards’ answer. Just two members – Brian Mooney and Deborah Oliver – spoke in support of Pearson. Oliver made the point that “When things are brought to us as a planning committee with public realm benefits, like terraces, we often approve the application thinking that there are going to be benefits, and then later on when we discover that those benefits haven’t happened, it does mean that when you get future applications coming forward, you’re  … thinking what’s the point of us agreeing things with benefits if they just get taken away?”

Two members actually spoke against Pearson. Graham Packham (scroll down here), the Deputy Chair, tried to help Richards out of the hole he’d dug for himself by asking whether any compensatory benefits had been negotiated for the removal of the roof terrace, although that was irrelevant to Pearson’s questions. Richards replied that there was a substantial contribution to the lighting of St Paul’s Cathedral. 

We have seen a letter from the cathedral’s surveyor to a planning officer*, copied to Richards, acknowledging that the cathedral was “proposed as a beneficiary of funds” (in fact, a bung of £2 million), but awkwardly saying that whether this was sufficient to offset the “removal of perceived public benefit” in the form of the roof terrace “must fall to the decision makers for the City  Corporation to weigh the adverse impact of the scheme against the public benefits it may deliver, in accordance with planning policy”. The writer of the letter was obviously uneasy about this. He went on to seek missing information about the appearance of the building as proposed in the new application with a view to its impact on the cathedral. So how can an application that potentially affects St Paul’s, the City’s flagship heritage asset around which much of its local plan revolves, not be an application of broad interest?

At this point, Richards  tried to gaslight listeners by mentioning that it was “a matter of judgment” whether the new application was of broad interest – which makes as much sense as saying that it’s a “matter of judgment” whether it’s dry and sunny or raining heavily. 

Shravan Joshi, the Chair, then aggressively gave his own version of “it’s dry and sunny while it’s raining heavily” by repeating Richard’s false claim that he “was following absolutely correct process … that all planning applications follow”. 

Richards mentioned at the beginning of his reply to Pearson that he had received notice of her question. (Requiring members to give advance notice of questions is an anti-democratic measure imposed by Hayward and his henchmen in recent years, and is another instance of the City council’s quasi-masonic culture: as masons themselves, Hayward and Joshi can be expected to feel comfortable with the notion that the master of a lodge / chair of a committee must never be put on the spot by a difficult question.) Receiving notice gave Richards time to weave into his prepared response a lot of irrelevancies and misdirections to distract the listener from the plain position presented in Pearson’s first question, and to try to make his claim that the new application was not of broad interest sound not quite as incredible as it actually was. Here are his various subterfuges:

–  When giving the reason for determining the new application himself instead of bringing it to committee, his actual words were “there were no broad interests considered”, instead of saying that the application was “not of broad interest”. This wordplay in his carefully prepared script may have been the use of a standard bureaucratic tactic of saying something that is narrowly and literally true – i.e. he didn’t consider broad interests in giving his hasty approval – but is deeply misleading to the reader. This wordplay, though, is a mere distraction from the fact that the application was of broad interest, even if he couldn’t bring himself to deny that in simple words, with the result that he did not have authority to determine it himself.

–  “The scheme, although it was a full application, comprised an amendment made to a scheme that was previously consented …” . The Scheme of Delegations does not confer authority on the Chief Planning Officer to determine a full application as if it were an amendment. In any case, it only confers authority on him to agree to actual amendments that are “non material”. Removing a major public benefit is without doubt material.

– “… a scheme that was previously consented by this committee in 2021 [actually it was in 2020] unanimously by 23 votes to zero with no abstentions”: but that was on the basis that the scheme contained the public benefits of a roof terrace and retail units, and it cannot be extrapolated that the committee would unanimously agree to the scheme without those benefits. In any case, if the application was of broad interest in 2020, why was essentially the same application but without the roof terrace and retail units not of broad interest in 2023?

– “We received three objections as part of this [new] application”. It would not have mattered if he had received none, as already explained.

– “We did discuss this matter in detail with the Chair of Planning … who concurred with my view that there was no broader interest, and that this application could be considered under delegated authority, which was done.” The Chair of Planning, Shravan Joshi, has no professional qualification or expertise in planning, so his view on any technical matter wasn’t worth seeking. One doesn’t, though, need to be a lawyer or a planning professional to understand the plain wording of the Scheme of Delegations, and Joshi’s interpretation was as obviously wrong as Richards’.

– Richards undertook to “look into” why notice of the planning application was only given to committee members in the November papers, which was two months after he had determined the application himself. He said he would “look into” this if “there was a shortfall there”. There obviously was a “shortfall” there. Since Richards had notice of Pearson’s question, presumably on at least the day before the meeting, why hadn’t he “looked into” it before answering her question? It doesn’t, in any case, have any bearing on the fact that he lacked authority to determine the application in the first place. A consequence of members only being notified in November was that, by then, the 6 week period had expired within which Richards’ unauthorised decision to approve the new application could be challenged by judicial review.

–  In response to Pearson’s second question, Richards didn’t try to distance himself from Hayward’s words in the Financial Times interview. On the contrary, Richards gushed that it was “an extremely uplifting piece by the Chair of Policy … really re-asserting the approach of planning in the City as being positive, non-adversarial and solution-focused, which  is why it’s an attractive place for developers and investors.” He evaded the quote in Pearson’s question about Hayward telling planning officers to make things “work for” developers. No professional officer should accept direction from a single member. That is expressly stated in paragraph 3(e) of the City council’s Member / Officer Charter: members can only act collectively through committees, and Hayward is not even on the Planning Committee. Describing the approach of the City council to planning as “positive, non-adversarial and solution-focused” is a bureaucratically euphemistic way of saying “yes” to what developers want. No wonder developers find the City an “attractive place” to build, when they can do so without consideration for other stakeholders, like residents or heritage. As a result, the City has become steadily less attractive aesthetically over the last couple of decades.

– After fawning over the “uplifting” effect of the Chair of Policy’s words, then reading some set piece propaganda, Richards declared: “We [himself] are proud public servants. We are proud of being impartial and independent. We offer objective planning advice based on policy and planning judgment.” There is no evidence to support his claim, and plenty to disprove it, but in the bureaucratic world that Richards inhabits, what is said is more important than what is true.

– He continued: “Ultimately the decision on planning rests upon this committee.” That being so, why didn’t he bring the new application for 81 Newgate Street to committee?

– He ended his carefully prepared response with these words: “Developers and investors form part of a wider eco system of stakeholders and customers, all of which we treat fairly and equally – that includes residents, occupiers, businesses and cultural institutions and the like. In carrying out those planning duties, we make sure that we treat all our stakeholders with fairness and impartiality. They’re all equally important to us as valued customers to our service and important stakeholders”.

If that were true – and it demonstrably isn’t – why do so many residents loathe the City council, including for its planning decisions that blight their lives, and why did so many of them sign a petition declaring they had no confidence in its planning system? Why does the Rabbi of Bevis Marks Synagogue find the City council so difficult to deal with, as it sneakily supports a developer erecting an office tower that would literally overshadow this architectural, historical and cultural jewel? **

The council has already tried and – narrowly, and very unusually – failed to get that office tower built in 2021. Richards, with his “impartial and independent” judgment, warmly recommended the application for that previous attempt, uttering such nonsense as : 

“the felt presence of tall buildings in the courtyard is not shocking, or in principle, incongruous, but is understood as part of the character of the place, another layer of history and change. The main impact is one of the qualities of the juxtaposition.”

It is certain that Richards will recommend approval of the application for the second attempt.

Pearson then eloquently pointed out the fallacy in what Richards had been saying about the new application for 81 Newgate Street not being of broad interest, and refocused listeners on what he had been trying to distract them from with his verbiage. She added that the curtailment of public benefit in the form of the roof terrace was contrary to the City council’s own much vaunted “Destination City” initiative.

Richards responded by saying that there was no planning policy requirement for the new building to a have a roof terrace. There is no planning policy requirement for any building to have a roof terrace, and Pearson wasn’t saying that there was. The significance of the roof terrace in the original application was that it provided some much needed public benefit, which is a relevant concept in planning, and Richards had allowed that benefit to be removed even though he mentioned (perhaps getting carried away in his defensiveness) that his officers had secured the terrace in the original application through “robust negotiations”. Why did they do that if this scheme was not of broad interest?

Pearson again brought him back to the point, and objected to it having “slid under [the radar]” without committee members having any knowledge of it. That was when Joshi aggressively intervened as already described to repeat Richards’ fallacy. But Pearson wasn’t having it, and repeated the plain but inconvenient truth that the new application was of broad interest, so should have been brought to committee. She pointed out the extraordinary speed with which Richards determined the new application, and contrasted it with a cycle project on her own Golden Lane Estate that had been submitted in September 2023 and had still not been approved.

Chair of the Planning Committee, Shravan Joshi, addressing his friends in the City Property Association. He smiles at them, but snarls at an alder representing a residential ward who asks the right questions, because right is wrong for the City council’s political establishment.

Richards’ responses to Pearson’s questions have exposed him as a poodle of the council’s political establishment. That establishment, led by Hayward, with Joshi clinging on to the side, is in turn a poodle of property developers. In no other local authority would such brazen promotion of private interests to public detriment be tolerated. It is tolerated in the City only because most of its members are elected through the undemocratic business voting system.

The City council has the powers of a local authority, including the power to grant planning permission, only because it has residents. That’s ironic, because it is the City’s residents who suffer most from the misfeasance of its business ward members, including bad planning decisions. Hayward, in his contempt for residents, thinks they can be contained by a PR initiative branded as a “reset” of relations between residents and the council’s leadership. Like all PR initiatives, it has failed because the council’s “communications” do  not correspond with reality. There can be no clearer example of the leadership’s anti-resident stance than this quote from Hayward himself in an article in the New York Times on 13/12/23 *** : “We’ve never considered ourselves as a residential city. Pepper-potting residential development around the City actually constrains that business growth, that commercial growth, that we want.” So get the message, residents: we don’t want you standing in the way of our developer friends making money.

Note to Richards: you need to correct the part of your script which reads “our stakeholders [are] all equally important to us as valued customers to our service and important stakeholders”. Your political master doesn’t want to have residents in the City at all, so they can’t be “equally important” to you as “valued customers … and important stakeholders”. Or perhaps you’ll now say that some stakeholders are more equal than others?

Chair of Policy, Chris Hayward: I tell planning officers to say “yes” to my developer friends, and I don’t want residents in the City.

A showdown between City residents and resident-bashing Hayward is looming with the planning application for London Wall West, which has already attracted 721 objections (although Hayward wouldn’t be moved even if it attracted 7,210 objections). Richards is certain to recommend approval, as he always does. Will the majority of members of the Planning Committee who practically always vote with the establishment do so on this occasion, or will some of them break ranks in view of the enormity of the proposed scheme, as they did with the first attempt to overshadow Bevis Marks Synagogue?

NOTES

*The full text of the letter from the St Paul’s Cathedral’s surveyor to a City planning officer on 81 Newgate Street is reproduced below:

**Reproduced below is the full text of The Fight To Save An Ancient City Synagogue From Developers by Christopher Howse, Spectator, 24 February 2024:

There was a little number, 223, pasted onto the back of one of the centuries old wooden seats in Bevis Marks synagogue in the City of London. ‘What are these?’ I asked Rabbi Shalom Morris, who was showing me round.

‘They’re called gavetas,‘ he replied, opening the lid of a compartment in the bench. ‘It’s a Portuguese word. They’re for people to leave their personal property here – prayer shawls and things – as we don’t carry anything on Shabbat.’

It was a detail that impressed on me the long history of the Sephardi tradition here, the oldest continuously functioning synagogue in Europe today. And now, Bevis Marks synagogue is under threat. There’s a proposal for a 43-storey tower block a few yards away at 31 Bury Street, which would literally overshadow the synagogue in its quiet paved courtyard.

Rabbi Morris, with a habitual smile and a New York accent from his upbringing, sounded the most unhappy when trying to convey his relations with the City of London authorities. He is fighting their planning decisions and simultaneously ‘pleading’ with them – an uncomfortable position. In the face of what Rabbi Morris calls ‘an abuse of power and a breach of our community’s trust’, the defence of Bevis Marks has attracted some eminent people. Nine professors of history, a former Lord Mayor, a former Master of the Rolls and well-known names like the historian Simon Schama and the novelist Howard Jacobson were among the 27 signatories of a letter in the Daily Telegraph declaring that the City’s failure to consider the religious and cultural dimensions of the synagogue will cause outrage.

To me, any very tall building in the City plonked next to an ancient place of worship is bullying bad manners. In the street called Bevis Marks (a name deriving from the property of the Abbot of Bury St Edmunds), a block built in 2019 bulges out over it, earning itself the nickname the Can of Ham.

I realise that some people like tall glass-clad buildings. Just let them not build them in front of St Paul’s or the remaining old buildings of the City of London which give us reason to love it as a tight urban development on a human scale. The reductio ad absurdum of recent London development has been the
proposal to build a 20-storey block actually above the listed Liverpool Street station and the hotel next door.

The case of Bevis Marks synagogue is particularly painful because it is unique of its kind, as historically emblematic to Jewry as St Paul’s Cathedral is to Christianity. What is so frustrating for defenders of the synagogue is that only in June 2022 the City denied planning permission for a development at 31 Bury Street because it would adversely affect the setting of the Grade I-listed Bevis Marks synagogue.

But since then, the City authorities have decided not to include 31 Bury Street in considering the ‘immediate setting’ of the synagogue. And although 31 Bury Street is now part of a conservation area, a prohibition of very tall buildings has been dropped.

In response to a City report on the synagogue, Abigail Green, professor of modern European History at the University of Oxford, made a point that struck a chord. ‘The heritage value of Bevis Marks synagogue is not purely architectural, she said. There is all the difference between a place of worship of historic beauty being conserved in use, and one kept open only as a museum. The latter can have the tragic air of a house abandoned in wartime.

Bevis Marks is a living community, not a museum. It holds Friday night and Saturday morning services and is popular for weddings. Its architecture also reflects the fortunes of the Jewish community since their implied ‘readmission’ to England under Oliver Cromwell several centuries after the expulsion of Jews in 1290.

The synagogue from the outside looks like a plain brick preaching-box of the period. It is not showy, less so even than the contemporary St Benet Paul’s Wharf, one of Wren’s essays in red brick. The flat east end of the synagogue forms part of the continuous building-line along Heneage Lane, a quiet York-stone pedestrian thoroughfare with lampposts down the middle.

It remains the only non-Christian place of worship in the City. The builders of the synagogue were trying not to ask for trouble, just as the 18th-century Catholic church in Warwick Street, built in the era before Catholic Emancipation, also kept to unadorned red brick with round-headed windows. Hence, at Bevis Marks, the discreet entrance is from a courtyard.

Today a stone is set over the iron gates from the street. (A security man let me in, since I had an appointment. That is the way things are today.) It bears an inscription repeated over the doorway within: ‘A.M. 5461’ AM stands for Anno Mundi. Above the date is an inscription in Hebrew: Shaar Asamaim – the Gate of Heaven.

The reference is to Jacob, awaking after his vision of the ladder to heaven and exclaiming: ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not. And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’ It is a reference also taken up by Christian churches.

Entering the synagogue from the courtyard at its western end, the visitor faces the Ark at the far end, which contains the Torah scrolls in a cabinet behind doors. Two panels above are inscribed with the Ten Commandments. There is a direct parallel here with the Commandment boards directed to be set up in Church of England parishes under Elizabeth I. Indeed the Ark at Bevis Marks bears a striking resemblance to a Wren altarpiece.

The architect was a master builder called Joseph Avis, who had worked for Wren, as had his craftsmen. The architectural historian Sharman Kadish notes other similarities to Wren churches and to contemporary Nonconformist churches, such as the large round-headed windows in all four walls filled with clear glass and the galleries on each side, which here accommodated women worshippers. Bevis Marks, says Dr Kadish, ‘is rooted in English soil, built by an English architect using English materials and influenced by contemporary English styles. On the other hand, it cannot be fully understood without reference to the architectural tradition of the western Sephardim, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, that began in Amsterdam.’

Inside, it is a quiet symphony of woodwork: the old floorboards, the high-seated benches facing the centre (as in Oxbridge colleges), the reading platform like a little stern-deck of a ship, the Tuscan pillars supporting the galleries, conventionally painted to resemble marble. From the plain ceiling seven big brass chandeliers hang low, to shed the light of hundreds of candles on service books. The biggest chandelier, in the centre, was a gift from the Portuguese Great Synagogue of Amsterdam. But they weren’t intended for use instead of daylight.

Visually, the marvellous thing is that the interior hasn’t obviously been messed about. The synagogue escaped many mortal dangers. A hundred yards away, the Great Synagogue, from the Ashkenazi tradition, was destroyed in the Blitz. Few now seem aware of its existence. The IRA bombings of the Baltic Exchange in 1992 and of Bishopsgate in 1993 left only superficial damage.

A more insidious danger loomed in the 1880s. A dependent Sephardic synagogue had been built in 1866 at Bryanston Street near Marble Arch. It would make perfect sense to sell the land at Bevis Marks to fund the synagogue in the West End. This disastrous error of judgment was headed off by the gloriously named Bevis Marks Anti-Demolition League.

Rabbi Morris, who has been here nine years, lives over the shop, or at least next to the synagogue. He took me out into the courtyard to the northern corner of the building. There we could see the sky on two sides, towards the south. In Jewish practice, the sabbath ends when three stars are visible, and a month begins when the moon is seen in the sky. The proposed tower-block would obliterate that sky.

‘It survived the Blitz, two subsequent bomb attacks and Victorian attempts at demolition, William Whyte, professor of architectural history at the University of Oxford told me. It would be a tragedy for our generation to be the ones who disregarded its significance as both an architectural gem and a precious piece of religious heritage.’

***The full text of In Central London, A Big Bet On A Return To The Office. The City of London, Britain’s Historic Financial District, Is Transforming Its Skyline With “Best In Class”, by Eshe Nelson, New York Times, 13 December 2023, updated 31 December 2023:

On a recent Monday afternoon, visitors emerging from the serenity of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of London could walk just a few steps north before being hit by a blast of noise: the near-deafening sounds of a giant hydraulic drill. A few steps farther, sparks flew overhead from another building site.

The City of London, Britain’s historic financial district, is awash with construction, the intensity of which is not expected to let up soon.

The City of London Corporation, the district’s governing body, has approved 10 new office towers, including one that will exceed the height of all others in the area, known locally as the Square Mile. Altogether, more than five million square feet of office space is under construction, with another five million square feet in the pipeline.

The plans, which will transform the district’s skyline, are a huge bet on the future of the workplace after two major shocks to the commercial real estate sector: the Brexit referendum, which sputtered development plans, and the pandemic lockdowns that left the city’s streets deserted.

The City’s office vacancy rate was 9.5 percent in the third quarter of this year, according to research from the real estate services firm JLL, notably higher than the long-term average of 5.7 percent. But for new builds, the vacancy rate was just 1.4 percent.

Developers face a “favorable environment” despite economic challenges like inflation and high interest rates, said Chris Valentine, the head of the central London office agency at JLL.

“Much of the existing development pipeline in the City of London is already pre-let, under offer or in negotiation,” Mr. Valentine said. He added that demand for “best in class” offices, with green credentials and the latest amenities, would continue into the second half of this decade.

The City of London Corporation is basing its growth estimates on a report it commissioned that found that an expected large increase in jobs in the district would support demand for office space regardless of whether hybrid work remained the norm.

“There’s still capacity for more to be done,” said Shravan Joshi, the chairman of the corporation’s planning and transportation committee. By 2040, the City of London will need 13 million square feet of additional office space, he added.

Despite the optimism, there are risks. The construction could lead to a glut of the older office buildings that companies will vacate. And there is always the threat that corporations will be drawn to other business districts, including Canary Wharf, two miles east.

Before the pandemic, about 540,000 workers commuted to the City. Now more jobs are based in the district — about 617,000 — but fewer people go into the office. The number of people entering and exiting London Underground stations in the Square Mile is, on average, about three-quarters of prepandemic levels.

The City of London Corporation is trying to entice workers and visitors back. This summer, the corporation started a website to promote the City’s art galleries, historical sites and other attractions. Though the district is still widely occupied by financial and professional services companies, new buildings are designed to attract small and midsize tenants, particularly technology firms.

Officials are also encouraging developers to make space in the towers available for the public, inspired by the success of the Sky Garden at the top of the district’s “Walkie-Talkie” building. Another building, the tallest in the City, opened with a 58th-floor viewing gallery called Horizon 22, and one has also opened up at the top of the new neighboring tower.

Demand for sustainability is strong, and four-fifths of the district’s buildings already meet top standards, Mr. Joshi said. Older buildings are struggling with occupancy, and in response, the corporation is loosening rules to convert them into venues for culture, higher education or hospitality.

Still, the overall focus is clear. “Our basic policy is office first,” Mr. Joshi said.

That stance was seemingly vindicated this summer by the news that HSBC would move its headquarters back to the Square Mile more than two decades after the bank was lured away to Canary Wharf. About six months earlier, the legal firm Clifford Chance had also said it would move to the City from Canary Wharf.

“These traditional firms from the City, like legal and banking, are looking back towards the Square Mile as their cultural home, their heritage home, where they first started from,” Mr. Joshi said.

After more than three centuries as Britain’s financial center, the City of London struggled from the 1990s to compete with Canary Wharf, former docklands that were redeveloped for high-rises that could offer much more space for banks and their trading floors. Expansion in the Square Mile was thwarted because of proximity to St. Paul’s and other historic buildings.

In Canary Wharf’s first years, many businesses were reluctant to move there, and the project almost failed amid a recession and the 1992 bankruptcy of Olympia & York, the company behind the development. But better mass transit links arrived, and companies followed.

By the early 2000s, Canary Wharf was bustling, said Lucy Newton, a professor of business history at the University of Reading’s Henley Business School. “It did take a while to get off the ground, but it had that support from financial institutions who felt they’d outgrown the City,” she said.

Three decades later, the tables have turned. Successive London mayors have loosened the Square Mile’s planning rules, and towers have shot up. There are still regulations protecting views of St. Paul’s and the Tower of London, and Mayor Sadiq Khan has ordered the district to confine towers to certain areas, but the density is going to increase.

“You can’t build out because you are a square mile, so you can really only build up,” said Chris Hayward, the corporation’s policy chairman and Mr. Joshi’s predecessor at the helm of the planning committee. In his three years leading that committee, “we built more tall buildings in the Square Mile than ever in the history of the Square Mile,” he added.

Just five months ago, the City of London Corporation approved a 63-story tower with 800,000 square feet of office space and room on the top floors for public events. Schroders Capital, the investment manager behind the project, described it as “a clear, long-term commitment to the City of London.”

To bolster its growth prospects, the City is trying to shed its image as a stuffy corporate neighborhood by luring more people to spend time there in the evenings and on weekends.

The Square Mile has about 9,000 residents, and officials are coaxing visitors with more leisure activities and well-known restaurants like the Wolseley, and highlighting its cultural attractions, including a new home for the Museum of London.

“We’ve never considered ourselves as a residential city,” Mr. Hayward said. “Pepper-potting residential development around the City actually constrains that business growth, that commercial growth, that we want.”

The Wolseley is hoping to be a part of that growth. For its second location, the high-end restaurant chose a spot near the north side of London Bridge, a gateway to the City. The company is also betting on a stronger return to the office as well as more tourists and residents to support the restaurant, which is two-thirds larger than the original.

“I think eventually a majority of people will come back to their offices Monday to Friday,” said Baton Berisha, the chief executive of the Wolseley Hospitality Group.

Kate Hart, the chief executive of the business improvement district where most of the towers are clustered, works with area businesses, which have about 80,000 employees. Her zone is still troubled by empty storefronts, including at Leadenhall Market, a protected landmark.

“There is this real drive to get people to come back to the office,” Ms. Hart said. But they need to see a benefit to commuting, she said, adding, “You can’t have that vibrancy if you don’t have that work force back.”

Even as more planning requests come in, not everyone is roaring ahead. The developers of 1 Undershaft, the building set to be the tallest, sent their architects back to the drawing board this year to adjust the design, seven years after the tower was granted approval.

And Landsec, one of the largest commercial real estate firms in Britain, with more than 10 billion pounds in real estate assets, is pivoting away from the City of London. In the past three years, it has sold office properties worth £2.2 billion across London, almost all in the City, halving the company’s assets there.

Landsec is shifting to the West End and an area near Waterloo, London’s busiest train station. Those neighborhoods have “a raft of bars and restaurants and the kind of mixed-use nature that makes it appealing to a much wider range of people than just people that rock up to an office to do some work,” said Remco Simon, the chief strategy and investment officer at Landsec.

But Landsec is not abandoning the City. The company owns One New Change, one of the biggest retail spaces in the district. The mall has been hammered by the departure of big brands, and most of the shops on the lower floor are empty. Landsec has reversed some of the downward momentum by bringing in a Formula 1 arcade, and the restaurant on the roof that overlooks St. Paul’s Cathedral remains popular.

And it’s still open to the potential of some office space there. Last month, Landsec received approval to demolish a building it bought in late 2020 and replace it with a 23-story tower with office and retail space. That said, “we haven’t committed to building the building,” Mr. Simon said.