Putting the final plan together would be achieved in a matter of weeks because of the enormous amount of graphics produced by Mike Murray and his team and the availability of both this material and text from the reports. The team had worked day and night for over a year, sacrificing many weekends in the process as had all the team. Because of the nature of their work Mike's group were inevitably at the end of the production line. This usually meant spending anything from two to four days with little or no sleep printing reports to ensure that the Steering Commit-tee's efforts remained focused. Mike told me later that he was never nearer a divorce from his wife Lynn than during this period even though she worked in the office and understood that architects and planners often worked en charrette through the night. Alan Bradshaw and Jim Foster were also near the limits of their endurance, but no one complained and the excitement of finally producing a plan and the opportunity to make it public at last kept the momentum going over these final weeks.

I worked with Jim Foster and Mike Murray's team to organise a draft of the final plan, which was to be presented to the Steering Committee at their meeting on 25 January 1968. Taking the text and illustrations from the nine reports, Jim and I proceeded to organise it so that the plan could be read in its entirety by the general public, reducing sometimes lengthy reports into a chapter of twelve pages or so. It was often a struggle to capture the essence of a report using as few technical terms as possible and eliminating any planning jargon that might have inadvertently crept in. With dictionary and thesaurus nearby we would ponder each word and phrase until we were both satisfied, but we had to be careful to keep as near as possible the original text so that the committee would recognise it as something they had already approved. If questioned we would need to be able to refer to the reports and make clear that where changes had occurred they had been made solely in the interests of clarity and continuity.