Place-based engagement & social value
Where institutional ambition meets local life.
Section 106 strategy, community engagement and social value for the organisations shaping the London Knowledge Quarter — King’s Cross, Somers Town and Bloomsbury.
Two Londons, a few hundred metres apart
Child poverty in St Pancras & Somers Town — the most deprived ward in Camden, with four of its five neighbourhoods among the 20% most deprived in England.
Child poverty in Camden’s wealthier northern wards — roughly two miles, and a different world, away.
One of London’s most deprived communities sits directly on the doorstep of one of the world’s densest concentrations of research, capital and innovation. That gap is both the risk and the opportunity every development in this corridor inherits.
Good engagement is no longer a secondary concern.
The context
The Knowledge Quarter is expanding fast — new life-science labs, research institutions and mixed-use developments arriving in one of the most closely watched corridors in the country. For the organisations behind that growth, Section 106 obligations, social-value commitments and community expectations increasingly decide whether a project succeeds, not just whether it is permitted.
Why it matters
Engagement run as a box-ticking exercise breeds the consultation fatigue and mistrust that stall approvals and shadow a project for years. Engagement done well earns the local legitimacy that lets ambitious development take root — and keeps timelines, budgets and reputations intact. The difference is rarely effort. It is credibility.
Our position
We are a place-based engagement and social-value advisory built around the realities of one specific corridor — King’s Cross, Somers Town and Bloomsbury. We help institutions and developers meet their Section 106 and social-value obligations in a way that builds genuine, durable trust rather than the appearance of it.
That distinction is also where the commercial value sits. Engagement a community can see through invites scrutiny, objection and delay. Engagement they can feel — that delivers real opportunity, access and benefit — protects timelines, reputations and the long-term licence to operate.
Core advisory
Three ways we work with you.
Section 106 & Social Value Review
An independent, pre-submission review of your planning proposals, social-value commitments and local employment and skills pledges — tested against current Camden and Islington priorities and against what communities here actually need, so your commitments are credible and defensible by the time they reach committee.
Local Engagement & Partnership Strategy
A grounded map of the people, organisations and dynamics that shape your corridor — community groups, estate boards, schools, youth provision, local employers and political stakeholders — with a practical plan for building real relationships through trusted local partners that holds over the life of a development.
Community Co-Design & Mediation
Hands-on facilitation when a project meets genuine local concern. We design and run honest, expert-led co-design sessions that surface the real issues, find workable common ground, and turn opposition into shared ownership — resolving tension by addressing it, rather than managing around it.
How we work.
People-first, never performative.
Real engagement, not the documentation of it.
Honest with both sides.
Candid about organisational constraints and community realities alike.
Hyper-local by design.
One corridor, known deeply — rather than everywhere, thinly.
Built for the long term.
Trust compounds; tactics expire. We build the kind that lasts.
Why we exist
“My younger sister was selected for the London AI Campus — a short walk from where she grew up. She spent her weeks building a robot, from the ground up.”
In Year 12, she had always pictured medicine or veterinary science. That one opportunity — a Google- and DeepMind-backed programme on her doorstep — opened a door she hadn’t known was there, and changed what she believed was possible for her.
Nothing about her had changed. The access had. That is the whole argument for this work: the talent in communities like Somers Town is already here — what is too often missing is the bridge to it. When institutions build that bridge deliberately, the value flows both ways.
— Jamal Mohamed · Founder, Somers Cross
Work with us
Let’s build something that lasts locally.
We take on a small number of clients at a time, so engagement is genuine rather than processed. To discuss a development, a planning submission or a social-value strategy, start a confidential conversation.
jamal@somerscross.co.uk