Chelmsford city council
Explaining city planning without jargon
Client: Chelmsford City Council
Sector: Public Sector (Local Government)
Date: Summer 2024
Services: e.g. Marketing, Branding, Socials
The brief:
Public understanding of how Local Plans work is low. And to be fair, the world of council planning has long been complex, wordy and difficult for people to understand.
That’s beginning to change. Authorities like our clients want their residents to know how the whole process works. Knowledge empowers them to take part, and in an ideal world, that results in good decisions for the whole community.
We wrote a series of ‘feature’ articles for this city council’s newssite to bust myths, spread understanding, and provide a resource for anyone taking part in consultation.
What we delivered:
Four articles, each covering a different aspect of planning:
who chooses ‘what goes where’ (spoiler: it’s often not the council!)
how to balance crises in housing, climate and ecology
how infrastructure like roads and schools get built
how flooding really works, and how planners guard places against it
The pieces were written in a lively, accessible, objective style. Nobody was going to read a dull explanation of local flood policy - so we grounded everything we wrote in what the district’s people actually cared about.
To make sure the articles really connected, we carried out research on current talking points in the community, spent time in the areas we were writing about, and got to know the city. This is something we love doing, but it was easier than usual in this case, since Sam grew up there!
“Have you ever walked through your town or village and wondered how it came to be what it is today? Why the village hall, the church, the shops and houses are laid out in the way they are? What made one street the ‘high street’ and another a back lane?”
