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Public health mental health is an emerging field with significant potential for contributing to improved public health. However there is a notable gap in support for people working in this field and limited opportunities to influence the public health agenda at a strategic or policy level. This article describes how the London‐wide public health mental health network provides a regional forum for members to share information, develop measures, databases and protocols, and support professional development. It is hoped that other such regional networks will be established, as well as sector groups at local level.

This article outlines the mental health promotion strategy developed by Greenwich teaching Primary Care Trust (tPCT). The strategy focuses on four themes: isolation, anxiety and depression, sleep, and stigma and discrimination. The aim is to address mental health promotion for all as well as targeted action for higher risk groups, in recognition of the great contrasts, diversity and significant economic inequalities that characterise the borough. A key challenge has been to integrate mental health promotion with wider agendas and it is intended that the strategy will inform other important areas of work in the borough, such as the neighbourhood renewal and health benefits regeneration programmes.

In 2001 each primary care trust in England was required to undertake a needs assessment in preparation for the development of a mental health promotion strategy. In Greenwich, it was decided to include the physical environment as one of the themes. This paper describes the findings of a literature review undertaken of health, social sciences and architectural research and the preliminary conceptual model subsequently developed to pull together all aspects of the interface between the urban and physical environment and mental well‐being. The literature review identified five key domains that impacted on this relationship: control over the internal housing environment, quality of housing design and maintenance, presence of valued ‘escape facilities’, crime and fear of crime, and social participation. That these domains can be confounded by socio‐economic and demographic factors and also interact with cultural factors and housing type suggests the importance of a public health approach, which focuses on causal systems rather than simply on individual causal factors.