© Luke O’Donovan
Londoners and visitors can now discover the City from a fresh perspective, thanks to the installation of four playful new wayfinding totems at some of its most iconic viewing platforms. These interventions encourage exploration at street level while connecting people to elevated views across the Square Mile.
Stemming from our ‘City Views’ design competition in partnership with the Eastern City Business Improvement District and the City of London Corporation, winning designers Bamidele, Farouk & Livia (bafalw) in collaboration with Red Collective, have now completed the installation of these pieces across four key sites in the City of London.
Consisting of four sculptural totems, the City Views custom icons have drawn inspiration from the surrounding skyline, creating distinctive markers that both enhance the public realm and support pedestrian navigation. They also each house a bespoke base, inviting people to sit down and engage with the streetscape around them, encouraging a relationship with the built environment, while achieving a more accessible route to various platforms around the Eastern City BID.
© George Baggaley
The design competition first sought entries in 2024, with the winning design announced in March 2025. Designs were originally praised for their standout approach to vertical storytelling and wayfinding through ground-level intervention, embodying youthful energy and interdisciplinary expertise, allowing the winning teams to bring something new to the BID footprint.
The teams set out to reimagine how structures for wayfinding can act as a means to interact and understand the city. They explained how the intention behind the series of totems was to celebrate the richness of stories and layers that make up the City, acting as bridges between the ground and sky. In a material sense, this concept has manifested through a pairing of steel and stone, characteristic of the built language of the city.
The winning teams said, “For us, we were always keen for the sculptures to say much more about place and people than just directing them. Through collaboration and involving a careful consideration of the relationship between materials of steel and stone, we hoped to reflect the many layers of voices, meanings, and experiences that make up our city.”
On the surfaces of the totem, hand-painted patterns and words carefully cover the faces of the intervention to direct, orient and reveal the memories and experiences of the different voices that make up the City of London. Further to this, each totem has a baseplate fixed between the steel and stone elements, engraved with a skyline of key buildings within the City of London borough area.
© Luke O’Donovan
Now officially stationed outside of the Lookout at 8 Bishopsgate, Horizon 22, The Garden at 120, and Sky Garden, each of these totems embody this year’s LFA theme of Voices through their integration of quotes from an audio installation celebrating stories tied to buildings and public areas across EC BID.
This competition and final design perfectly represent the very foundations of NLA Collaborate as a project, bringing together various stakeholders, and delivering a design which itself is a creative collaboration between different teams. London Festival of Architecture Director Rosa Rogina further added:
“This project is a true testament to the power of collaboration – uniting a young design collective and a newly established fabrication studio with four building owners, the City of London Corporation, and the EC BID. It shows how fresh creativity and thoughtful design can reimagine the Square Mile, transforming everyday wayfinding into an inspiring encounter that connects ground and sky, people and place.
Now forming a key part of the streetscape around this heavily frequented area of the square mile, these totems are to remain in place for a minimum of 18 months, helping to direct pedestrians on street level and creating a core piece of wayfinding for the City of London.
We hope the project can encourage more opportunities to bring together the visitors, workers and adjacent neighbourhoods that we see in our everyday. We hope that it can celebrate how our experiences can activate and manifest in the public realm alongside our day-to-day lives in more physical and lasting ways, the winning designers remarked upon their hopes for the installation.
You can view the totems outside the four viewing platforms around the City of London across the next 18 months, so be sure to catch them while they’re around.
© Luke O’Donovan
© George Baggaley
