GREEN REFUGE
ARTS AND CULTURE | 2023
Art direction and visual identity for Green Refuge, an augmented reality heritage trail commissioned for London Festival of Architecture 2023.
Introduction
Green Refuge was commissioned for the London Festival of Architecture 2023, transforming Clapham Common into a vibrant archive of sanctuary stories—from Blitz-era shelters to the Caribbean communities of the Windrush generation who made the common their own over decades. The project posed an urgent, personal question: what does a place remember, and who gets to tell that story? It was one of the most considered briefs this studio has worked on — a commission at the intersection of heritage design, environmental storytelling, and community history.
Green Refuge was commissioned for the London Festival of Architecture 2023, transforming Clapham Common into a vibrant archive of sanctuary stories—from Blitz-era shelters to the Caribbean communities of the Windrush generation who made the common their own over decades. The project posed an urgent, personal question: what does a place remember, and who gets to tell that story? It was one of the most considered briefs this studio has worked on — a commission at the intersection of heritage design, environmental storytelling, and community history.
Services
Bespoke Logotype
Brand Identity and Direction
Printed Ephemera
Signage
Web Design
Bespoke Logotype
Brand Identity and Direction
Printed Ephemera
Signage
Web Design
The Challenge
The brief was to create an augmented reality heritage trail that could hold the depth of these histories without flattening them. As I read more about displacement, the climate crisis, and the relationship between Black and Brown communities and green space in Britain, it became clear the design couldn't simply illustrate these accounts. It had to be fashioned by them. The typography had to feel like it had grown from the ground itself, not applied to the landscape. Environmental illustration for public space carries a responsibility, and the people whose histories you are representing will stand upon the place the work inhabits.
The Solution
Custom typeface built from the commons' own flora — cow parsley, dock, wildgrass — letting the landscape author its own visual identity. Type as testimony. Each letterform carries something of the place it came from, making the act of reading itself a kind of attention.
The augmented reality layer allowed stories to surface only in place, only in context, honouring the specificity of where these histories actually lived. This wasn't illustration applied to a space, but design that could only exist in that space, inseparable from the ground it stood on. The result was a piece of public graphic design and environmental storytelling which moved between the physical and digital without losing the substance of either. Design as reciprocity: the common had sheltered people for centuries. This was a way of sheltering it back.
The brief was to create an augmented reality heritage trail that could hold the depth of these histories without flattening them. As I read more about displacement, the climate crisis, and the relationship between Black and Brown communities and green space in Britain, it became clear the design couldn't simply illustrate these accounts. It had to be fashioned by them. The typography had to feel like it had grown from the ground itself, not applied to the landscape. Environmental illustration for public space carries a responsibility, and the people whose histories you are representing will stand upon the place the work inhabits.
The Solution
Custom typeface built from the commons' own flora — cow parsley, dock, wildgrass — letting the landscape author its own visual identity. Type as testimony. Each letterform carries something of the place it came from, making the act of reading itself a kind of attention.
The augmented reality layer allowed stories to surface only in place, only in context, honouring the specificity of where these histories actually lived. This wasn't illustration applied to a space, but design that could only exist in that space, inseparable from the ground it stood on. The result was a piece of public graphic design and environmental storytelling which moved between the physical and digital without losing the substance of either. Design as reciprocity: the common had sheltered people for centuries. This was a way of sheltering it back.
