An urbanist who has spent decades writing about how London is built says he intends to stand for Mayor of London in 2028, and that the industry which builds the city will be his constituency.
Peter Murray OBE made the declaration unprompted, in the opening seconds of a recorded conversation with RealTimes on 14 August, before any election question was put to him.
“I’m Peter Murray, and I’m planning to be mayor of London in May 2028. And so I’m getting my policies in order at the moment.”
The poll is scheduled for 4 May 2028. Nominations do not open until weeks before it, so nobody is formally a candidate yet, and this piece reports a stated intention rather than a candidacy. What is unusual is not someone surfacing four years out. It is the constituency he has chosen, and the contested claim he rests it on.
Can the built environment be a political constituency?
Asked how he would introduce himself to the room he opens in September, he went past biography and straight into policy. His first question would be about height.
“what do you think of the new London plan, which suggests that all tall buildings are restricted, well, buildings over 100 metres are restricted to metropolitan areas”
His reading of the document is accurate. The draft London Plan, published on 16 July 2026 and open for consultation until 15 October, designates buildings of 100 metres and above as metropolitan tall buildings and directs them to 17 strategic locations rather than to borough discretion. It also lowers the threshold for “tall” to 30 metres.
He then named the group he intends to organise around.
“And so my constituency, as it were, as a mayor, is that built environment sector.”
A constituency in London politics is ordinarily a place. This one is not, and it does not vote as a bloc. It is an industry of architects, developers, engineers, landlords and estate managers, spread across every borough and substantially staffed by people who do not live in the city they build. Whether a platform can rest on an industry rather than a geography remains an open question outside the candidacy itself.
He was blunt about the current administration.
“It is something which the current mayor has no interest in at all.”
That is his characterisation, offered here as such. City Hall’s relationship with the development industry is contested rather than settled, and the same administration’s July 2026 draft plan is explicitly aimed at unlocking supply.
It is also a diagnosis that not everyone working on London’s housing shares. Antonia Jennings, chief executive of the independent think tank Centre for London, told the London Assembly’s budget and performance committee in October 2025 that “the supply side is one of two overlapping crises”, pointing to an affordability distortion in which the ratio of house prices to incomes has risen from 4.5 to 12. On that reading, a platform aimed squarely at the people who build has picked one half of the problem.
Is the sector really bigger than financial services in London?
The proposition underneath the candidacy is that the built environment sector is the larger part of the city’s economy. He credited published research.
“as an industry, it is … a larger industry actually in London than the financial sector.”
The research exists, the comparison is real, and it does not measure London. Published in September 2025 with GLA Economics and the London School of Economics, the study puts the built environment sector at 24% of Great Britain’s gross value added, or £568 billion, and 3.8 million jobs, 12% of the workforce. It calls that “over twice the size of the financial services sector”. Its own footnote sets out the basis: “Unless otherwise specified, GVA and employment figures used in this report are for Great Britain, rather than the UK.”
London sits inside that national number rather than beside it: the same research places 17% of Britain’s built environment jobs and 43% of its architecture jobs in the capital. No published research draws a like-for-like comparison of London’s built environment sector against London’s financial sector. In a contest for one city, a claim evidenced nationally and unevidenced locally is a meaningful gap.
The gap, dimension by dimension:
- Geography: the September 2025 research measured Great Britain; the claim asserts London.
- Metric: the research measured gross value added and number of people employed; the claim asserts “a larger industry”.
- Sector size: the research measured £568 billion, 24% of Great Britain’s GVA; the claim does not specify.
- Employment: the research measured about 3.8 million people, 12% of the workforce; the claim does not specify.
- Comparator: the research measured financial services, at under half the size; the claim asserts London’s financial sector.
- London’s position: the research measured 17% of Britain’s built environment jobs and 43% of its architecture jobs; the claim treats London as the whole.
- Date: the research was published in September 2025; the claim is made in the present tense.
What has actually stopped London building?
On why delivery stalled, he gave a four-part account.
“Because we’ve been going through a stage where housing delivery of new housing has almost ground to a halt. For a number of reasons, partly the increase in interest rates, huge inflation in the building industry, lack of skilled staff in construction, and inflation in building materials and so on.”
The stall is not in dispute. Additional new homes completed in London fell from 45,680 in 2019/20 to 32,160 in 2023/24, on London Assembly figures. The Home Builders Federation reported in September 2025 that only 30,000 homes were completed in the capital in the year to June 2025, down 12%, that sites starting had fallen by 38%, and that just 966 projects were approved in the 12 months to June, the lowest since records began in 2006. Against the standard method requirement of 88,000 homes a year, output would need to rise by 175%.
His causes hold up unevenly against the evidence.
- Skills shortage: substantiated, and national rather than London-specific. The Construction Industry Training Board puts the shortfall at roughly 48,000 extra workers a year, rising to an average of 110,000 a year over five years if the housing and retrofit targets are to be met by 2030. Around 24% of the construction workforce was over 55 as at 2023.
- Building and materials inflation: real, but the shock has largely passed. The BCIS private housing construction price index stood at 2.3% in the first quarter of 2026, against a peak of 15.3% in the second quarter of 2022. Costs remain high, but the rate of increase is a fraction of what it was when delivery began falling.
- Interest rates: the evidence linking Bank Rate to viability is sector-wide and general, with no London-specific quantification in published research.
A competing account exists, from the trade body closest to the decline. The Home Builders Federation’s own September 2025 diagnosis leads on none of those three. It names weak mortgage lending and affordability, planning complexity, building safety delays, policy costs including dual staircase and carbon offset requirements, the 35% affordable housing threshold, and remediation costs. The two accounts point toward different policy levers for a future mayoralty. Each is evidenced.
He treats the fourth factor as an error of modelling rather than of intent.
“made more difficult by a lot of fire regulations which were brought in following the tragic Grenfell Tower fire when many people died. And quite rightly, we’ve tightened up on skills and we’ve tightened up on regulations. But that has had a real impact, which I don’t think the politicians understood at the time.”
The regime he describes was created by the Building Safety Act 2022, the legislative response to the fire at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017, in which 72 people died. Its second gateway, the pre-construction approval stage for higher risk buildings, has measurably slowed high-rise delivery: the Home Builders Federation reported in September 2025 that almost 10,000 homes had been stuck in it for more than six months. The regulator’s own published data shows the backlog clearing, with 347 decisions issued in December 2025 alone. Both are true, and the safety rationale for the regime is not in question.
Asked whether “get stuff done” was his slogan, he kept it conditional.
“It depends. It depends on the audience. But get stuff done is the more general one.”
Whether the industry recognises itself as his electorate is, so far, his assertion rather than a demonstrated fact.
He moderates Canvas I: Vision at B2BV2V26 London on Tuesday 8 September. Doors open at 14:00. Tickets are on sale at RealTimes.co.
How this article was sourced
Every quotation above is verbatim from the conversation recorded on 14 August 2026, and is reproduced without compression. He states an intention to stand in 2028; he is not yet a candidate, and RealTimes does not characterise him as one.
RealTimes convenes the event he moderates on 8 September, which is a conflict a reader is entitled to weigh. This piece reaches conclusions he has not endorsed. It was written by the editorial desk, was not submitted to him for approval, and any correction or response he wishes to make will be published here in full.
One question in this article is unanswered because we could not find anyone who has answered it. We looked for a published assessment, by a scholar of the London mayoralty or an independent institute, of whether an industry can function as a political constituency at all. There does not appear to be one. The literature covers the mayor’s powers and the capital’s devolution settlement in depth, and is silent on this. The question stays open in the piece because it is open in the field.
Frequently asked questions
When is the next London mayoral election?
4 May 2028, under the statutory timetable published by London Elects, the official body for Greater London Authority elections. The mayoralty runs on a four-year term with no term limit. A candidate must lodge 330 signatures from registered London electors, ten from each of the 32 boroughs and from the City of London, plus a £10,000 deposit returned only above 5% of the vote.
What does the Mayor of London actually control in planning?
The Mayor sets the London Plan, the statutory spatial development strategy for the capital, and under the Town and Country Planning (Mayor of London) Order 2008 may direct refusal of an application of potential strategic importance, or take over its determination. The 32 boroughs and the City of London Corporation remain the local planning authorities for most decisions. The third article in this series audits which parts of the platform those powers would actually permit.
Who is the candidate?
An urbanist, curator and convenor who has written and broadcast on London’s built environment for decades, including on the City’s tall-building boom. He is not a practising architect. He moderates Canvas I: Vision at B2BV2V26 London on 8 September.
How big is London’s built environment sector?
No published figure isolates it in the form the comparison requires. The September 2025 research measures Great Britain: £568 billion, 24% of national gross value added, roughly 3.8 million jobs. London’s measurable share within that is 17% of Britain’s built environment jobs and 43% of its architecture jobs.
What is his main policy proposal?
Replacing the charge a developer currently learns only late in a project with one known at the outset. He states the proposal is not finished: “The election is two years away, and I’m still working on the process for larger projects and mixed use projects.” The second article in this series examines the mechanism and the evidence he offers for it.