A Make project
Making the invisible visible - historic facade hiding a future-ready building. Making the invisible visible.
Lion Plaza sits on a 2,000-year-old site in the heart of the City of London. Behind the historic exterior, new ownership has invested in one of the most ambitious sustainability retrofits in the City, upgrading the building's EPC rating to B and placing it in the top 21% of London office stock for energy performance.
The building was quietly delivering on 2030 targets years ahead of schedule. But to tenants living through building works, to investors assessing the asset and prospective occupiers weighing up the market - the sustainability programme was invisible. The works felt like disruption, not progress. And a building genuinely ahead of City of London environmental regulations looked, from the outside, like it was simply standing still.
We created LIONWORKS — a sub-brand built specifically to make the invisible visible.
The core insight was simple: a sustainability programme of this scale deserved its own identity and voice. Not a footnote in a compliance report. Not a line in an investor deck. A living, ongoing presence that gave every audience, owners, tenants, prospective occupiers, the City itself, a clear and compelling way to understand what was happening inside the building and why it mattered.
LIONWORKS turned building works into a programme of environmental commitment. Every phase of activity became a communications moment: what was being done, what it would achieve, how it connected to the broader 2030 targets the building was already exceeding.
Tenant engagement events, proactive updates, ESG reporting that spoke in plain language rather than compliance shorthand — all unified under a single sub-brand running alongside the Lion Plaza identity. The result was a shift in how the works were perceived.
Tenants who had been sceptical of the building programme became its advocates — because they could now see what it was delivering for them, for their own ESG commitments, and for the building they had chosen to call home. Staying at Lion Plaza, the numbers showed, avoided nearly five times the embodied carbon of relocating. That's not a footnote. That's a headline.
For investors, LIONWORKS made the asset's forward value legible: a building already ahead of incoming City of London environmental regulations, with a sustainability story that protects long-term value as compliance requirements tighten.
For prospective tenants, it reframed the entire proposition. Lion Plaza isn't a historic building being maintained. It's a historic building being future-proofed — and LIONWORKS is the proof.
“We’ve already had enthusiastic feedback from several tenants. Taking an optimistic approach really changes people’s perception of the building works.” — Fraser Wilson, Asset Manager
