This dissertation answers the question of how 1981–6 Greater London Council (GLC) used grants to voluntary groups. In doing so, it makes visible part of an unnoticed history of how London was remade in the 1980s and creates an introduction for future studies of both the GLC and the organisations it supported. Part of this history is a vision for what London might have been created by the labour movement and the Labour Party’s last GLC administration. Asking how the money that the last GLC’s Labour administration spent on what it called ‘voluntary and community groups’ means understanding how it imagined that the labour movement would transform local government in its own image to extend democracy from politics to all civil society. The particularities of this vision were largely forgotten as London’s labour movement and its relationships with non-state groups have been overlooked in histories of the late twentieth century. Therefore, this dissertation describes four important areas of the city’s social and economic life where the London Labour Party tried to implement its socialist vision by using grants to non-state organisations: public transport for people with disabilities, health and medicine, under-fives childcare and education, and policing. Although the GLC was abolished by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1986, these attempted policy implementations by London’s labour movement created a long-running and widespread legacy. Examples of this include the creation of the dial-a-ride public transport service for people with disabilities and of London’s democratically accountable police authority. But by tracing the archival sources from the GLC into the bodies it funded, this dissertation also pays particular attention to the political work and ideas of the people who constituted organisations in these four policy areas. They frequently belonged to networks or institutions connected to either the labour movement or other political or religious tendencies. In each of the four policy areas studied here, there were contrasts and overlaps in thought and action between, on the one hand, people in (or aligned to) the labour movement, and, on the other, groups from different non-labour-movement organisations. They used the grants they received for different imagined purposes even when their actions looked similar from the outside. This dissertation describes in various ways how the non-labour-movement side tended towards dominance in each sector after the GLC’s abolition. The fact that multiple alternatives existed, however, is key to understanding London’s history and how change and continuity in small democratic organisations, caused by the everyday work of the people who ran them, created many of the trends which, in retrospect, looked like large, impersonal forces. This can make the course of history seem obvious or necessary, as in the assumption that the labour-movement vision for London described here – of industrial democracy and state developmentalism – would inevitably diminish. Although the 1980s have been remembered and, partially, historicised as the decade of the labour movement’s unavoidable defeat, in London and at the GLC the labour-movement alternative existed and was a viable political option until 1986 – for two thirds of the decade. Although the last Labour GLC’s overall vision for London was never fully implemented, its attempts changed the city forever.