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Shoe Lane, City of London
Deloitte HQ campus — public realm
Built by Landform Consultants
James Rudoni
Director, KG Electrical
Shoe Lane is a public garden sitting between Deloitte’s head office buildings in the City of London — a landscaped outdoor space that anyone passing through can use, designed to bring greenery, calm and character to one of London’s densest commercial districts. Since its completion it has won multiple industry awards including a National Landscape Award from BALI and an APL Commercial Garden Award, with further awards in progress.
The landscape was built by Landform Consultants, led by Mark Gregory — one of the most decorated figures in British landscaping. Mark has spent over 35 years at the forefront of the industry, with 30 consecutive years at RHS Chelsea Flower Show, three gold medals as a designer, and a track record that includes building gardens for the BBC, the RHS, and some of the country’s most significant private and public commissions. When Landform take on a project, the lighting has to match the ambition of everything around it.
Why KG Electrical
Mark Gregory told Kyle directly: KG Electrical were the only electricians he had considered for this project and the only ones he trusted to design and deliver what the scheme needed. That’s a significant endorsement from someone who works at this level and has done so for decades.
On a project like Shoe Lane, the lighting design isn’t a finishing touch. It determines whether the space works at night — whether people feel comfortable moving through it, whether the planting reads as intended after dark, whether the architecture of the garden holds. Getting it wrong in a public space that thousands of people pass through is not an option.
The garden is built around sweeping curves of engineered hardwood — tiered seating, planting beds and stepped terraces that wrap through the space in flowing lines. The lighting follows those curves. LED strips are concealed behind the timber fascias, washing warm light downward along the grain and giving every tier its own glow. At night, the whole garden becomes a series of illuminated arcs — the architecture of the space revealed rather than flattened by the lighting.
The trees and planting are uplighted using Hunza, LuxR and Bega fittings — supplied by Landscape Plus and specified for the demands of a permanent, public-facing installation. Inground uplighters illuminate the stone steps. Recessed wall lights are set into the timber cladding at key points, marking thresholds and changes in level without interrupting the visual flow of the space.
The path through the garden is guided by a fibre optic starlight floor — tiny points of light set into the stone that lead visitors through the space after dark. It’s subtle enough that you might not immediately identify what you’re looking at, but effective enough that you follow it without thinking. That’s exactly the right outcome for a public space: intuitive, not instructional.
No project of this complexity is without compromise. The existing canopy lights — infrastructure from the buildings above — couldn’t be altered, and in places they compete with the path lighting below. On a scheme where the lighting design was built from scratch to serve the garden, inheriting fixed elements that you can’t control is a limitation. It’s worth being honest about: not every element of every scheme is within the designer’s hands, and working intelligently around what’s fixed is part of the job.
What’s in the photographs, and what’s winning awards, is the scheme that KG Electrical designed and installed — the LED-lit timber tiers, the uplighted trees, the fibre optic pathway. The rest of it is context.
Photographed by James Rudoni — the illuminated timber tiers, the uplighted trees, the fibre optic pathway and the garden as a whole after dark.
Since completion, the Garden at Shoe Lane has been recognised at the highest level of the industry — a National Landscape Award from BALI, an APL Commercial Garden Award for 2026, and further international awards still pending. Recognition like that belongs to the whole project. But a public garden only wins awards if it works after dark as well as it does in daylight — and that part was KG Electrical’s to design and deliver.
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