London Forum / AGM Archives

29Jun 2026

Summer drinks party at Cowcross Street

London Forum2026-07-02T09:56:47+01:0029th June 2026|Tags: London Forum / AGM|

The annual summer drinks party for London Forum’s members will be held at the Alan Baxter office building at Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6EJ, near Farringdon station.

Please do come along and join Trustees and committee members for drinks and nibbles on Monday 24 August from 6.30pm to 8.30pm and meet fellow activists from other member societies across London.

This is a free event for a maximum of two people per society – please book your place(s) using the booking facility.

The entrance to the Gallery is at the far [more…]

09May 2026

Using AI in your Civic Society – Meeting Report & Videos

London Forum2026-05-30T10:47:17+01:009th May 2026|Categories: Events, Updates|Tags: Central Government, GLA and Local Government, London Forum / AGM, Member Societies|

We held a lively interactive meeting on the subject of Artificial Intelligence on 30th April, which was recorded. Our first speaker, Richard Farthing, covered the background and some relevant uses, not only of well-known ‘chatbots’ such as ChatGPT, but also applications that use AI in the background, and real-world examples, particularly around planning. The second half was a full-on interactive session led by John Myers, who tested out several audience questions on live AI services, ranging from planning to creating images.

We naturally chose AI – in the [more…]

29Mar 2026

Are London’s High Streets and Town Centres in Crisis? Meeting report

London Forum2026-04-01T16:13:06+01:0029th March 2026|Categories: Updates|Tags: Central Government, GLA and Local Government, High Streets, London Forum / AGM, Night Time Economy|

We held a lively meeting last week, chaired by Michael Bach (pictured), examining the many issues around high streets and the night time economy. We had four expert speakers, and a significant number of audience questions.

For the first time, we video-recorded the event. The video and audio recordings are posted on the event page. We used AI to generate a summary, plus an even shorter summary here. If you’d like to discover how we did this, please book for our AI talk at the end of [more…]

19Mar 2026

Using AI in your Civic Society

London Forum2026-05-11T12:25:18+01:0019th March 2026|Tags: London Forum / AGM, Member Societies|

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere in the news and in business these days – we even used it to generate the image for this event. How can it help your civic society ? Do you need to be an expert? (No!) Civic societies are often under-resourced, and at this event we showed that with a little knowledge, illustrated with examples, AI can bolster your resources in several useful ways, without necessarily spending a penny.

Agenda

We looked at some novel pre-built applications and services that use AI behind the [more…]

09Mar 2026

Website search improvements

London Forum2026-03-15T19:13:45+00:009th March 2026|Categories: Updates|Tags: London Forum / AGM, Member Societies|

We’ve long had an effective search facility on the website for current news, Insights, events and other pages. Last week there was an opportune moment to invest in an important additional feature to support our institutional knowledge: Search for our archive of several hundred pdf files

This is significant, in that the entire archive is now indexed and searchable, most notably ‘What We’ve said‘ since 2011, all reports and pdf attachments, plus historic editions of Insights and NewsForum.

If you’re researching particular subject in our [more…]

07Feb 2026

Can you help ?

London Forum2026-02-07T11:25:29+00:007th February 2026|Categories: Updates|Tags: London Forum / AGM, Member Societies|

The Forum’s Membership Services Committee (MSC) is looking for volunteers to help with activities, including organising events, producing news and Insights editorial, and communicating with the membership. Is this you? Please contact the secretary and let us know how you can help.

31Dec 2025

CBE for Tony Travers

London Forum2026-01-01T16:52:25+00:0031st December 2025|Categories: Updates|Tags: London Forum / AGM|

Tony Travers, Visiting Professor in the LSE Department of Government, Associate Dean of the LSE School of Public Policy, Director of LSE London and Patron of London Forum of Amenity and Civic Societies was awarded in the King’s New Year Honours a CBE for Services to Economics and to Public Service.

Congratulations to Tony for this well deserved honour.

You can book for our open meeting on 29th January to hear Tony’s comments on ‘Densifying the suburbs’.

14Dec 2025

New Resource Pages

London Forum2025-12-15T01:08:23+00:0014th December 2025|Categories: Updates|Tags: Central Government, GLA and Local Government, London Forum / AGM, Member Societies|

There are many public sources of articles, reports and publications that could be important to London Forum’s members to help awareness of policy changes and activity of Government and GLA departments. The information could be useful for the way societies work with their local authority and their MP.

To help you, we’ve created a Resources website menu with links to useful research resources on the Internet, as well as to relevant London Forum material, including the Find Your Local Society page with its new map, and the [more…]

24Nov 2025

Interactive member map

London Forum2025-11-24T11:42:22+00:0024th November 2025|Categories: Updates|Tags: London Forum / AGM, Member Societies|

We’ve added a new interactive member map to appropriate web pages, based on membership data provided by societies. Try it out live here (the image in this article is necessarily a static screenshot for publication). You can zoom in, and click on any of the blobs representing societies – the size of which represents membership – and review the data we show, including clickable links to member websites – example illustrated.

If you spot errors in location (an approximation in a handful of cases), or the [more…]

12Nov 2025