Andrew established the award-winning Brentford High Street Steering Group (BHSSG) which relaunched Brentford Market. This has now once again become a key meeting point for local people.

As Chair of BHSSG he fundraised and project managed the development of new town centre car park, a new post of Town Centre Manager, a marketing-led website and new town branding/signage – all backed by successful bids for £1.25m from the Mayor’s Outer London Fund.

As part of his drive for a better Brentford, he raised £15k of initial grant funding for a six-month exercise to create a new community vision for the historic town’s future. This community-led study, authored by Andrew with support from the New Economics Foundation, was pioneering in rooting its recommendations in a detailed understanding of development economics and the density of development that this implied.

He achieved cross-party buy-in to the process and subsequently engaged Ben Bolgar and The Prince’s Foundation (then The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment) as consultants to produce a follow-up study co-funded by landowners/ developers Ballymore.

The Community Vision shaped the local planning policy of London Borough of Hounslow (‘Brentford Area Action Plan’) and set an innovative national precedent for what could be achieved by local communities before the introduction of Neighbourhood planning in the 2011 Localism Act. This substantially informed the 2014 planning application for the £1bn regeneration of Brentford’s historic town centre that Ballymore is now building out.

Some of the early experience of the Community Visioning journey was captured as a case study in David Boyle’s ‘Communities Actually’ (LGA Liberal Democrats, 2007, pgs 48-53). During the extended period of development blight Andrew led the launch, and subsequently advised the management, of the Docking Station community hub in the town centre.