Mat Proctor
Senior Associate, Head of Urban Design

Mat is an urban designer and city planner with over two decades of experience shaping places at every scale, from city-wide strategies to neighbourhood masterplans.

As Head of Urban Design Mat leads a multidisciplinary team specialising in strategic-scale projects that address the complex challenges of cities today. He is passionate about harnessing creativity, data, and collaboration to deliver visionary ideas that respond to client aspirations and create lasting social and spatial impact. His role involves guiding projects from inception to delivery, engaging with a breadth of stakeholders, and ensuring the practice’s urban design ethos is embedded across HTA’s work.

Before joining HTA, Mat held senior leadership roles in both the public and private sectors, including leading the urban design team at the Greater London Authority, providing expert advice to the Mayor on strategic applications and producing Opportunity Area Planning Frameworks for some of London’s largest regeneration sites, such as the Royal Docks and Thamesmead. His career spans influential work across London and internationally, including masterplanning and infrastructure projects in Western Sydney and Paris. He has also contributed to major infrastructure projects in the UK, including HS2 at Euston and the Bakerloo Line Extension.

Mat’s expertise includes urban regeneration, estate renewal, place-making for new settlements, geospatial urban design, and policy development, having shaped and implemented the London Plan and multiple Local Plans across the UK. He is committed to inclusive, collaborative design, ensuring that local communities are meaningfully and actively involved when places change.

Alongside his work in practice, Mat is a member of the NLA Expert Health Panel and has extensive experience of design review. This includes previously serving on the Tower Hamlets Design Review Panel; establishing and managing the Oxford Design Review Panel; and overseeing design review at LB Lewisham.  He tutors in Urban Design at the Bartlett, UCL, and regularly contributes to academic and professional forums, helping grow the next generation of built environment professionals.

Mat holds qualifications across architecture, planning, and landscape architecture, including a BA (Hons) Politics from the University of Liverpool, a Bachelor of Design in Architecture from the University of Technology Sydney, an MA in Spatial Planning and Urban Design with Distinction from London Metropolitan University, and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of East London. He also holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Geographic Data Science from Birkbeck and is an Associate Member of the RTPIand the Landscape Institute.