Beyond the Logo: How Hounslow Is Building a Place Brand for the Future
Why successful place branding is less about visual identity and more about creating a shared story for regeneration, investment and community.
Hounslow is a borough with plenty of stories to tell. The challenge was working out how they fit together.
Hounslow is made up of distinct places with strong local identities, from Chiswick and Brentford to Feltham, Heston, Isleworth and Hounslow Town Centre. The challenge for the council was finding a broader story that could connect these different parts of the borough.
That is where the place brand comes in.
For Councillor Tom Bruce, Deputy Leader of Hounslow Council, and Peter O’Brien, Director of Regeneration and Growth at Hounslow Council, the starting point was storytelling.
“I’m a big, big believer in storytelling.”
A strategically informed story, Peter explains, can show where a place is going, what it has to work with and how its different projects connect. The question he kept coming back to was:
“What’s our story?”
For Hounslow, finding an answer meant spending time listening to the people who live and work there. More than 200 community members were involved in the discovery process through focus groups and one-to-one conversations. The council initially planned six months for this stage, then extended it to around nine months when it became clear that deeper engagement was needed.
The process was designed as ongoing dialogue rather than a one-off consultation. The council returned to what it had heard and built from there.
Peter recalls one community member questioning an idea because it felt generic and did not sound like Hounslow. That kind of challenge was important. If a place brand is supposed to represent a place, it has to come from the place itself.
The logo was never the point
One of the lessons from the process was how easily place branding can be reduced to its most visible elements. Peter says people naturally focused on the logo, colours, fonts and the finished document. But those were only the surface.
“That is merely the dressing of your story and the dressing of your work.”
The more important question was how the brand could become a strategic narrative and a set of values that could influence the council’s wider work. For Hounslow, that meant bringing ideas such as partnership, growth and community into the way the borough talks about itself.
The council’s community awards offer one example. Rather than seeing them simply as a council-branded event, Peter describes them as an opportunity to celebrate the individual stories of residents doing meaningful things in their communities.
Those stories become part of the wider narrative about Hounslow:
“That’s where the real power is. Not a logo, not an identity.”
Tom makes a similar point when he reflects on what the council wanted from the outset. The ambition was never to create a badge that people could wear and leave at that.
“We didn’t want an ‘I love Hounslow’ badge and be done.”
Instead, the team wanted to think about what the brand could become over five and ten years, how it could bring different partners together and how it could help communicate what Hounslow does well, where it is changing and where it wants to go next.
Bringing different places into one story
Part of the challenge Hounslow faced was that the borough already had strong identities across its different areas. As Peter explains, people might associate Hounslow with Chiswick, Feltham, Brentford or its Town Centre, but there was less of a shared story connecting those places.
The question for the council was how to bring those different identities together without losing what makes each place distinctive.
“What’s your collective story? How do you weave these places together into a unified and coherent story?”
The place brand was intended to help answer that question. Rather than replacing local identities, it could provide a broader narrative for the borough, giving residents, businesses, partners and visitors a way to understand how its different places fit together.
That also connects to a wider ambition around civic pride. Tom points out that someone might say they are from Chiswick or Isleworth rather than Hounslow, even while being part of the wider borough. For him, the goal is to build pride in both the local area and Hounslow as a whole.
The place brand therefore has an internal role as well as an external one. It is about how Hounslow communicates itself to investors and visitors, but also how the people who live and work across the borough see their connection to the wider place.
When the brand meets regeneration
The practical test for the place brand is what it enables beyond communications.
For Hounslow, one of the clearest applications is regeneration and inward investment. Councillor Tom Bruce describes the brand as part of how the borough communicates that it is a place to do business, a place that is forward-looking and a place with opportunities.
Peter points to the Golden Mile as an example of where the strategic narrative connects directly to the investment story. The area is one of West London’s major regeneration opportunities, with plans for up to 14,000 homes and a similar number of jobs. For Hounslow, the challenge is therefore larger than promoting individual development sites. It is about explaining what the area could become, what it needs to support that growth and why investment matters.
“The story is what is this place and what’s the investment potential?”
That story also connects to the infrastructure needed to support the Golden Mile's transformation. Peter points to the A4 road as one example. Rather than functioning simply as an urban motorway that passes through and separates neighbourhoods, the ambition is to make it a more positive part of the area, helping people move between neighbourhoods and strengthening those connections.
The same thinking feeds into the campaign for the West London Orbital. Better transport connections would support the wider regeneration plans and help the area realise its investment potential.
“These are the sorts of things we’re campaigning on to build the investment narrative for the Golden Mile and Place Brand sits at the heart of that story.”
This is where place branding starts to operate as part of regeneration strategy rather than sitting alongside it as a communications exercise.
The same principle appears in the discussion around Feltham, where regeneration is being considered in relation to the needs of the existing community and the people who may move into the area in future.
For Hounslow, the aim is to connect investment and development with a wider story about the communities and places those projects are intended to serve.
Planning for a future that cannot be predicted
That longer-term thinking comes through in Hounslow’s Vision 2050 work. The council spent around a year engaging with people about what the borough could look like in the future, including jobs, housing and other aspects of life in Hounslow.
Young people were part of that conversation too. Peter asks what a current 12-year-old might want Hounslow to look like in 25 years, and what they might want from the place they live.
However, Tom says there is no way to know exactly what Hounslow will look like that far ahead. The people growing up there today will experience a different borough from the one that exists now. As he puts it, “So you have to be adaptable.”
That applies to the place brand too. It needs to reflect what Hounslow is today while leaving room for the borough, its communities and its ambitions to change over time.
Building a brand people can use
Hounslow's experience suggests that the work does not end when a place brand launches.
The visual identity is simply one expression of a much larger idea. The harder work is making the story useful: in regeneration, investment, community engagement, culture, communications and the everyday ways a place presents itself.
That also means giving the brand time.
Hounslow's discovery process was extended because the council wanted more time for deeper learning. That longer-term approach is reflected in ambitions that stretch decades beyond the launch, while ongoing regeneration will continue to change the physical and social fabric of the borough.
A successful place brand therefore cannot be treated as a finished product; it has to keep developing alongside the place itself.
For Hounslow, the opportunity is to use the brand to connect its different communities, projects and ambitions around a shared sense of where the borough is going. The real measure of that work will not be how the logo looks on a page. It will be what people do with the story once it becomes part of the place.
Listen to the full episode with Councillor Tom Bruce and Peter O’Brien on Talking Place, Season 3 Episode 36, available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and all major platforms.
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Tanisha Raffiuddin is Creative Director at Concept Culture and host of Talking Place. Conversations on placemaking, branding, sustainability and culture across the built environment.