Lidl
London

The building

A new store fitted into the ground floor of an existing brick terrace, with the whole shopfront zone — fascia, signage panel and the soffit over the recessed entrance — formed in aluminium and installed against brickwork that is well over a century old and nowhere near plumb.

Working the pavement

There is no site here. There is a footway, a bus stop, a scissor lift and a permit. Panels were cut and folded off site so that the work on the pavement was fixing only, and the noisy operations went to nights.

The fascia line had to run level across a frontage that steps, so the packers behind it do the work the eye never sees.

The soffit

The recessed entrance soffit is the detail people stand under while they wait. It is fully lined, with the lighting and the security shutter head integrated, and the joints set out symmetrically about the door rather than starting from one end and stopping where they stopped.