Designing London’s Recovery

City Hall has called on innovators to come up with their best ideas to help London emerge stronger from COVID-19 and ensure we actively design a better city to live, work and visit. 

‘Designing London’s Recovery’ is the Mayor's £500,000 new challenge programme. 11 London-based innovators have been awarded funding to help them design, test and scale their creative solutions to help support four of the nine recovery missions:  

• Helping Londoners into Good Work  
• A green new deal 
• High Streets for All 
• Building Stronger Communities 

To ensure that Londoners’ voices are heard in these challenges too, City Hall’s Opinion Research team is working closely with the programme. Where available, the team will share relevant polling and survey data to help inform the development of the innovations. This will help ensure that any new products and services brought to market are user-led.   

The ‘Designing London’s Recovery’ programme launched in April 2021 with an open call to London-based innovators. 

From August 2021 to November 2021, an expert jury selected 20 of them. They were invited to a series of co-design workshops where they developed their ideas into proposals. 

Innovators got the chance to bid for funding to design, test and scale up their solutions. In February 2022, 11 of them were awarded funding and given additional support up until the end of October 2022. This includes access to City Hall’s and Design Council’s network of experts as well as opportunities to exhibit their solutions. 

Part of City Hall’s Economic Development Unit, the Economic Strategy & Innovation team leads on and develops the Mayor's policies to help London's economy to grow.  

Currently we are working with partners across London on plans to recover from the pandemic.  

We also provide an open innovation service for London. As part of this we create challenge prizes, which invite innovators to help solve London's most pressing problems at pace.  

Finally, we support the growth of the life sciences sector through funding MedCity, which works to advance cutting-edge health innovation.