Oxford Street Development Corporation Website

Oxford Street is one of the most famous shopping streets in the world, but it has struggled in recent years. To lead its transformation, the Mayor of London set up the Oxford Street Development Corporation (OSDC), a new Mayoral Development Corporation with planning powers for the street and its surroundings.

Brand agency Anatomy created OSDC’s brand and digital design, and we partnered with Anatomy to build the website. A new public body needed a site ready to a fixed timetable: one that explains OSDC’s vision to Londoners and visitors, serves developers and residents dealing with planning, and meets public-sector standards for accessibility, transparency and data protection.

We turned Anatomy’s identity into a bespoke WordPress website with fast-loading, accessible pages. A library of 25 content blocks covers OSDC’s needs, from heroes, timelines and tabbed content to team and board profiles, accordions, publications, news articles and accessible forms, so the OSDC team can build and update pages themselves.

The website brings OSDC’s public services together. A planning hub guides applicants and residents through applications, decisions, committee meetings, pre-application advice, policy and enforcement, linking out to OSDC’s planning register. The site is connected to ModernGov, OSDC’s committee papers system, so board and committee papers sit within the site’s own design, and an inline document viewer lets visitors page through, zoom and download documents without leaving the site.

A public body’s website has to work for everyone. The site is WCAG 2.2 AA compliant, the standard the Greater London Authority set, and we treated accessibility as part of the build rather than a final check. That means skip links and clear focus states, menus, tabs, accordions and carousels that all work from the keyboard, clear headings, helpful guidance on forms, reduced motion for visitors who prefer it, and pages that still work when text is enlarged or the screen is very short.

Since launch, we have continued to develop the site alongside OSDC’s growing remit. That has included expanding the planning section as OSDC became the local planning authority for the area, and adding new tools for publishing documents.