078 LONDON RETAIL / REGENT STREET
Regent’s Park
Oxford Circus
Piccadilly Circus Hyde Park Charing Cross Mayfair Green Park City of Westminster
Even in it’s earliest incarnation, London’s Regent Street was designed with retail and entertainment in mind. When architect and planner John Nash delivered his initial concept in 1811, it was for a grand boul- evard that would connect the newly formed Regent’s Park to the north with Charing Cross to the south – a hub of high-class so- ciety at the time. Nash’s original vision was characterised by a uniform identity, with façades sharing a common height and style and, though none of the original buildings survive, subsequent waves of rebuilding and redevelopment have tried to recapture this initial vision of homogeny – all with varying levels of success.
In the mid 1990s, the Crown Estate – land- owners since the street’s inception – un- dertook the latest, and most radical wave of changes to the street. A £750 million programme set about adapting premises for the modern age and developing the street- scape to establish Regent Street among the world’s most famous shopping destinations. Naturally, lighting was a key aspect of this plan. Applications were received from a number of individual leaseholders along the street, typically the larger stores, asking to light their own façades in a particular style. Wary that this would produce a muddled overview, the Estate decided that a single coherent scheme should be implemented instead, one that would emphasise the qual- ity of the architecture of the whole street rather than picking out specific store fronts. Lighting designer Tony Rimmer came on board in the early stages of the project and
maintained a continuing role throughout - first as head of the lighting department at Imagination and later through his own practice Studio-29.
The key aim of the scheme was to ensure that the same treatment was applied to every façade and all the return façades in the adjoining streets. This included high- lighting the common height of the cornicing and defining the chamfered ends of each block, thus creating an uninterrupted, richly illuminated view along the street’s length. Each façade is given a wash of warm white light with architectural features, such as columns and statues, emphasised in a cool white to add depth and definition. The street is divided into twenty blocks, ten on the west side and ten on the east. These run in a straight stretch south from Regent’s Park, curve gracefully to the east to join Piccadilly Circus, home of the iconic ‘Eros’ statue, and then turn south again towards The Mall.
The scale of the project was formidable and required careful planning to make the proc- ess as efficient as possible. Each block along the street has its stone façade cleaned once every ten years and, by scheduling installa- tions to run in tandem with this work, sig- nificant reductions to both budget (thanks to a shared use of scaffolding) and general disruption were achieved.
Much consideration was given to minimis- ing visual clutter on the building façades. Standard light fittings were customised and cut-down with remote gear and drivers hid- den from view; fibre optic projectors were
First conceived as part of the royal route linking Regent’s Park in the north with Charing Cross at its southern tip, Regent Street has remained under the control of a single landowner, the Crown Estate. In the 1990s an ambitious redevelopment plan began to bring a homogeny to the streetscape to enhance its status as a world-class shopping destination. The street includes some of London’s most iconic sites, including the curving Quadrant (right) and Piccadilly Circus, home to the ‘Eros’ statue (far right).
The Mall
Regent Street
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