Production: Squint Opera

Role: Creative Director

Client: Hawkins/Brown · London, UK

London’s sewer system was built 150 years ago for a city half the size it is today. The Thames Tideway project is the long-overdue upgrade, a major new tunnel running beneath the river and the biggest investment in London’s wastewater infrastructure in a generation.

But the tunnel itself isn’t what people will see. What Londoners experience happens above ground.

Hawkins\Brown were appointed to design the public spaces that sit on top of the Tideway sites, new parks, embankments and pocket gardens along the Thames at Chelsea, Victoria and Blackfriars.

I came on board as Creative Director to make a film that would explain the project to the public and bring the design process to life.

The result was a short documentary built around conversations with the architects, close-up footage of the working models, and location filming along the river itself. The aim was to make a complex infrastructure project feel accessible to show the thinking behind the designs, not just the finished images.