News
Giving A Lift To Tower Bridge
3rd September 2007 - 18:05
When it was completed in 1894, London's Tower Bridge was the largest and most sophisticated bascule bridge ever constructed - bascule being French for see-saw. It took eight years, five major contractors and 432 construction workers to complete. By comparison, it took Leach just three weeks to construct and install the exhibition graphics for the new Tower Bridge Exhibition.
The design work was a collaboration between Nottingham based design companies Large Creative and Heritage Multimedia with whom Leach helped develop the graphic processes and refine some of the installation concepts in order to turn the designers' ideas into reality.
Housed in the Victorian Engine Rooms and home to the beautifully restored pumping engines, accumulators and boilers that used to power the Bridge lifts, the design was themed to match the rather austere surroundings of the Victorian buildings sympathetically. Simple screen printed, multilingual, information and directional panels were mounted directly onto walls, suspended from ceilings and machines or printed directly onto specially constructed tracking made to resemble cast iron 'I' beam girders. Other graphics were screen printed directly to painted brick walls in the exhibition area - yet another Leach specialty.
The Victorian's certainly built things to last as the Leach installation team can testify after drilling into 'hard as iron' bricks, floors and ceilings. Also built to last is 'Vault', a Leach display innovation that was approved by the designers and the client team as being the ideal solution to provide high impact durable graphics in areas prone to visitor damage.
Tower Bridge business manager Lance Bourne said, "Leach Colour's professionalism and attention to detail were very much in evidence throughout and made it possible to maintain an extremely high quality finish against an almost impossibly tight deadline. I was most impressed."
