22 Bishopsgate is one of the largest and most ambitious commercial buildings ever delivered in the City of London.

Conceived as more than a conventional office tower, the building set out to redefine what a people-first workplace could be, one that prioritised human experience, cultural vitality and long-term relevance alongside commercial performance.

We were engaged through a close working relationship with senior leadership and the operational team, beginning prior to occupation and continuing as the building transitioned from development into live operation.

When the Head of the Building moved into post, we were brought with him to help carry the vision through into reality.

The challenge was not design quality, amenities, or branding.

The deeper challenge was coherence.

How do you:

• Create a distinctive personality and lived experience for a building of this scale?

• Align leadership, operations and occupiers around a shared people-first ethos?

• Ensure that communications, engagement and experience are not superficial, but genuinely expressive of intent?

• Move beyond aspiration and make human experience observable, measurable and repeatable?

This required more than messaging. It required strategic, cultural and operational alignment.

We worked as trusted advisors to senior leadership and the operations team to establish a clear, shared framework for what the building stood for, and how that intent should be expressed, experienced and sustained.

Our work focused on:

• Defining the true meaning of a people-first building, beyond amenity lists or marketing language

• Creating a coherent personality and voice through communications, engagement and experiential design

• Developing a brand expression framework that could guide decisions across teams and touchpoints

• Establishing a shared vision and language to align leadership, operations and partners

• Devising a platform to surface and evidence performance against the people-first and experiential ethos

This work gave the building a clear internal mandate, not just an external story.

The engagement resulted in:

• Strong alignment between leadership intent and operational delivery

• A distinctive, credible personality expressed consistently across experience, culture and communications

• A people-first ethos that could be actively stewarded, not passively claimed

• A platform and language that enabled performance to be surfaced and discussed

22 Bishopsgate has since become a global benchmark for its class of workplace, influencing the approach taken on other major developments across London and beyond.