HIGH STREET REGENERATION | AREA BRANDING | SHOPFRONTS
North Hyde Road is a parade of shops on a busy road in Hayes. You could drive past it every day and not notice it. We were commissioned by Hillingdon Council to come up with ideas to change this.
Design is problem solving, so identifying what needed solving was key. We set out the problems plainly in a report, along with recommended solutions. Shutters hide shop fronts once the shops close, making the area feel unwelcoming. Projecting signs, put up wherever there was room, make it feel cluttered and unloved. Colours chosen shop by shop, without considering the parade as a whole break its rhythm and make one business blend into another.
Parades work best when there is some order. This is difficult to do once parades have undergone years of organic change with little enforcement. We believe that parades should be treated as a brand with each shop seen as a sub-brand of the parade. To start this process, we created visuals to form the beginning of enforceable guidelines for the parade to include:
We visualised it by day and by night. It’s important to show what makes the shops visible at all after four o'clock in winter.
Finally the branding. Most areas have a story to tell, something that goes under the radar. These stories deserve to be told, and North Hyde Parade had a belter. The Fairey Aviation Company built aircraft directly opposite, on the site Asda now occupies. A passer-by would never know, but it was still talked about online. We bought local history books, airline memorabilia and collected some wonderful old aviation posters Fairey ran in the 1930s. This gave us the starting point for the parade's identity: a name painted across the buildings in the style of the company that was there at the start of Britain’s aviation industry (Heathrow was Fairey's testing ground, which the government requisitioned in WW2).
We have worked with LB Hillingdon since 2010 and have been nudging them for years to celebrate the borough’s links to aviation and would love to work with them on this in the future.
