London Design Festival 2025: Design Transforms the City with Landmark Public Installations

Beacon by Lee Broom

This September, London Design Festival returns with its most ambitious edition yet, a city-wide programme of exhibitions, installations, and experiences that explore how design intersects with technology, sustainability, and cultural heritage. At the centre of the Festival are its landmark projects: two signature large-scale commissions that demonstrate design’s power to reimagine public space and spark meaningful dialogue.

Supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, with Bloomberg Connects as the official digital guide, the Festival encourages audiences to encounter design not in galleries or showrooms but in the city itself, embedded within its most recognisable public spaces.

The first landmark project, What Nelson Sees by Paul Cocksedge, in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture, transforms Trafalgar Square. A striking freestanding structure of intersecting tubes invites visitors to look through telescopic portals and experience London from Admiral Nelson’s vantage point, fifty metres above the square, a perspective hidden from the public for almost two centuries. These portals frame not only the contemporary skyline but also animated glimpses of London’s past and speculative visions of its future. Using Flow, Google’s AI filmmaking tool, the work reveals how the city has continuously reinvented itself, from horse-drawn carriages to climate-adapted streetscapes.

What Nelson Sees by Paul Cocksedge

Across the Thames, the second landmark project, Beacon by Lee Broom, rises at the entrance to the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall. Inspired by the area’s Brutalist architecture and the spirit of the 1951 Festival of Britain, the installation reimagines Victorian street lamps as a monumental chandelier-like form. By night, Beacon comes alive in a choreographed display of light, pulsing in rhythm with the city and visible from bridges and embankments across the river.

Together, these two projects define the Festival’s 2025 edition. More than installations, they are signature statements that place design at the heart of the city, connecting past, present, and future in ways that are both accessible and inspiring.