King’s College London is consistently ranked among the world’s leading universities, yet in a city defined by landmarks – places that announce themselves through history, architecture or sheer presence – its location is surprisingly easy to overlook unless you already belong to it. Ask most Londoners where King’s is, and you are likely to get a pause rather than a precise answer.
In reality, the university is distributed across five campuses on both sides of the river. Even within a single campus, the Strand, there is a richness and variety that includes five distinct buildings, from the former BBC headquarters at Bush House to the neo-Gothic Maughan Library on Chancery Lane. Our brief focused on something more immediate: making the main entrance to the Strand campus visible and recognisable at street level.
The Strand Building itself does not immediately help that cause. Built in 1972, it is a long concrete structure, set back slightly from the street, with a recessed entrance that can easily be mistaken for a secondary doorway. It is the kind of building people walk past without registering, particularly in a part of London where visual competition is high and attention is fleeting.
The breakthrough came from reconsidering what was already there. The building stretches for 90 metres along the pavement, with a continuous run of windows at street level. Rather than trying to compete with the architecture, we used that length as an asset. We saw it as an opportunity to create presence through accumulation, something that reveals itself as you move along it.
Universities build their reputations over time through the people who pass through them, and they sustain them by continuing to attract those who want to be part of that lineage. We translated that idea into a visible, street-level narrative: a timeline of notable alumni interwoven with current students, turning the façade into a living record of contribution and ambition.
What followed was a highly detailed process. Each of the 217 artworks varied in size and position, requiring careful coordination in measurement, manufacture and installation. It was as much an installation as it was signage, demanding precision at every stage to ensure that the whole read coherently rather than as a series of individual pieces.
Although originally conceived as a temporary intervention, the scheme has remained in place for seven years, and counting, a result of the care taken in its specification and delivery. It continues to do what it was designed to do: catch attention, hold it just long enough, and make clear to passers-by that this is not just another office building, but the threshold to a university with a long and ongoing impact.
We delivered beyond the brief and under budget, but more importantly, we shifted how the building is perceived – from something easy to miss to something that quietly asserts its presence over time. As our client put it, the process was marked by “clear, authoritative management conducted with patience and geniality,” which, in many ways, reflects the tone of the outcome itself.
