James Chesebrough Swaffield was born at Cheltenham on February 16 1924 . His father was a director of a soap company. He attended Cheltenham Grammar School and Haberdashers’ Aske’s, Hampstead.

Swaffield saw war service from 1942 with the RNVR, staying on post-war to retire a lieutenant-commander. On demobilisation he trained to be a council solicitor in Wembley, taking a London University degree (and later an Oxford MA). Qualifying in 1949, he joined the town clerk’s department at Lincoln.

He moved on to Norwich, Cheltenham and Southend, and in 1956 was appointed deputy town clerk of Blackpool. Promoted to town clerk soon after, he became the youngest in any county borough.

Sir James Swaffield held two of the most influential positions in English local government as secretary of the Association of Municipal Corporations and, from 1973, director-general of the Greater London Council.

In 1984 he became a successful chairman of the British Rail Property Board. Swaffield took the chair of the Property Board as British Rail under Sir Bob Reid was focusing more on its businesses. He handed over 10 sites to the Royal Society for Nature Conservation, but the thrust of the Board’s activities was firmly commercial. Its largest development – Broadgate, on the site of Broad Street station – showed, with Canary Wharf, that London was turning the corner. Also on the drawing board, though it would take 25 years to deliver, was the redevelopment of 125 acres behind King’s Cross and St Pancras stations.

Swaffield was a long-serving chairman of the London Marathon Charitable Trust and deputy lieutenant for Greater London. He was appointed CBE in 1971 and knighted in 1976.