Guiding Lights
Landmark Project
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For his first Landmark Project for London Design Festival, designer Lee Broom will create a constellation of black lampposts crowned with ethereal glass shades for the entrance of the Royal Festival Hall.
Created in partnership with Czech glass masters Brokis and eco-design pioneers Materials Assemble, the installation on the South Bank is a dialogue between eras.
‘I’ve always looked to the past in my work,’ Broom says. ‘Even though I’m a modernist at heart, I believe that to create something with a sense of timelessness, or even classicism, you have to look back in some way – not to replicate, but to understand and reinterpret. With Beacon, although it is a modern and forward-facing piece, it felt important that it was also grounded in its environment and in the rich history of the Southbank Centre.’ In 1951 during the Festival of Britain the Royal Festival Hall was declared to be a ‘beacon of change’, and the work revives that spirit for 2025.
For Broom himself, it’s a homecoming: ‘I launched my career at LDF in 2007. To return with a Landmark Project feels significant,’ he says. The work draws inspiration from George Vulliamy’s Victorian lampposts that were installed along the Thames in the 1870s, reimagining their silhouettes as fragments of a floating chandelier. Meanwhile its textured glass echoes the Baltic Pine imprints of the Hayward Gallery’s concrete walls, as a homage to one of the South Bank’s most distinctive architectural features.
“I launched my career at LDF in 2007. To return with a Landmark Project feels significant.”
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Sustainability is at the installation's core. Each glass shade is forged from discarded fragments from Brokis’ Czech glassworks in the Czech republic, upcycling waste into radiant new forms. It draws on the brand’s 200-year heritage and cutting-edge recycling technology. Lee Broom designed the entire structure for disassembly, ensuring every component lives beyond the festival. Post-exhibition, the lamps could become functional art, standalone fixtures for homes, pendant chandeliers for public spaces, or relics embedded back into South Bank’s architecture, with a portion of the proceeds from their sale being donated to charity. ‘I hope people take a piece of Beacon home,’ Broom says. ‘It won’t just be a fleeting installation – it was important that it had longevity and that it could evolve and continue to be part of the city in a new way.’
By day, the installation sets off the Southbank Centre’s stark lines; by night, it glows like a communal hearth, visible from bridges and embankments. On the hour, the installation stirs to life, its illuminated shades rising in harmony with the chimes of Big Ben across the Thames. What begins as a gentle, poetic pulse intensifies into a sweeping crescendo, unfurling a choreography of light that ripples across the South Bank.
‘Light holds a meditative quality – it has the power to evoke something deeper – the way people are drawn to the light of a campfire, or the stillness that comes from watching a sunset,’ says Broom.
‘I hope visitors pause – not to reflect on one idea, but simply to stop in the middle of a busy moment to take in the beauty and the form, and then find themselves contemplating. Maybe about the city, themselves or maybe nothing at all. Just the act of being present with the light is enough.
During London Design Festival Beacon will offer an open-air sanctuary, a place where history, material innovation and shared experience converge. After LDF, it will remain through winter as part of the Southbank Centre’s Winter Light Festival, its glow a testament to London’s enduring dialogue between heritage and reinvention.
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