8 Bishopsgate rises 50 storeys above the corner of Bishopsgate and Leadenhall Street, designed by WilkinsonEyre with Arup as structural engineer and developed by Stanhope for Mitsubishi Estate London. Its stacked, stepping profile exists to protect the view of St Paul’s from Fleet Street, and it is BREEAM Outstanding rated, with a public viewing gallery at the top and more than a tenth of the building given over to amenity.
One of the tenants is a leading international law firm, whose London base occupies around 60,000 sq ft across four floors of the tower. xsign was appointed by fit-out contractor BW Interiors to design, manufacture and install the signage and graphics throughout: identity, room signage, wayfinding, joinery marking, glazing manifestations and the statutory layer, followed by a further floor to the same details as the office grew.
A law firm’s office is not a building you can treat as a blank canvas. The scheme had to be fitted around confidential working space, in an occupied tower, with everything arriving through a booked goods lift more than twenty floors up. Access windows were short and the finished surfaces were already in place, so almost nothing could be drilled.
The design intent was a single bronze running through the whole floorplate, and that is harder than it sounds. The same colour had to read identically on 10mm router cut aluminium, on 1mm discs the size of a coin, on 30mm acrylic sprayed to look like solid metal, and against oak veneer, stone, glass and plain plaster. A bronze that looks right on a large projecting sign can look flat and grey at 50mm across.
Room signage was the other problem. In a firm of this kind, who sits where changes constantly, so a bonded sign with a printed name would be out of date within weeks. Whatever went on the doors had to be updatable by the firm’s own team, in seconds, without tools, and without losing the braille or the crispness of the detail.
The scheme also had to be repeatable. When a further floor was taken on later, the new signage had to match work already installed rather than merely resemble it.
One bronze, everywhere. The whole scheme is finished in a single anodic bronze matt powder coat, carried across every element and every substrate. Projecting pictogram signs are router cut from 10mm aluminium and fixed on nylon plugs with countersunk fixings. Push and pull discs, teapoint and joinery markers are 1mm aluminium with the text and pictograms ceramic etched into the face rather than printed onto it, so the marking is part of the surface and will not wear off a door that is used a hundred times a day. The identity itself is router cut from 30mm acrylic block, wet sprayed on the face and partial returns to match the same bronze, and halo illuminated in a warm 3000K so it reads as metal by day and floats off the stone at night.
Room signage that stays current. Every room sign is an xsign Folio™ unit: a 3mm acrylic face in a soft neutral over a 2mm aluminium base coated to match a warm off-white, with the door number 3D printed rather than applied. Behind the face sits an acetate insert carrying the occupant names, printed by the firm and loaded from the side, so a change of room is a slide of a sheet rather than a new sign. The braille is printed in clear, which means the sign meets its accessibility duty without a raised grey block interrupting a very controlled piece of design. Where signs land on glass they are taped rather than drilled, with a white vinyl backer behind to mask the fixings.
The quieter layers. Glazing manifestations are digitally printed onto dusted film with environmentally friendly inks and profile cut, giving the glazed offices and meeting rooms their privacy and their safety marking in one move. Statutory signage sits on 0.9mm stainless steel discs with direct UV print, and there are more than sixty of those alone. Every teapoint and staff lounge island is marked with etched discs and panels for waste, recycling, coffee cups, glassware and dishwashers, because a floor this well finished should not end up with printed labels stuck to the joinery.
Installation ran to the BW Interiors programme in tight windows around a working office, with deliveries staged by goods lift and each area handed over as the fit-out released it. Almost everything is fixed with high bond tape onto finished surfaces, so the setting out had to be right first time: there is no second chance on a stone wall or an oak veneered door. The projecting signs are the exception, and their fixing positions were surveyed on site rather than taken from drawings.
When the firm later took an additional floor, xsign returned and built it to the same specification: the same bronze, the same typeface, the same Folio™ units, so the new floor is indistinguishable from the original. The result is a scheme that does its work quietly. In a building whose best feature is the view out of the window, the signage was never going to be the thing people talk about, and that is exactly the point.
