City dressing

Bring impact and atmosphere to your public spaces with city dressing

Field and Lawn provide a comprehensive city dressing solution, covering design and planning to installation and removal. We work with local authorities, Town Centre Managers, BIDs, marketing agencies and placemaking professionals across the UK to create sustainable schemes, with bold creative direction, aligned to your objectives. City dressing isn’t just for cities, it can work in all types of public spaces!

What is city dressing?

City dressing is the temporary decoration of public spaces such as high streets, town centres, and shopping areas. City dressing installations can use a variety of visually engaging products from immersive experiential installations to simple but effective lamp post banners, flags and bunting. The objective is to increase footfall and dwell time, providing commercial benefits while spreading joy and community pride for wellbeing and engagement increase footfall. City dressing can work best during landmark events, public holidays, or seasonally around spring and summer.

Is there a difference between placemaking and city dressing?

Both placemaking and city dressing are closely connected, but city dressing usually forms part of a wider placemaking strategy and direction, with city dressing adding a visual layer of identity through solutions such as illumination and street decoration. Whereas placemaking is the broader, strategic approach to how a destination looks, feels and functions together. The most successful city dressing projects fuse both aspects together and Field and Lawn are experts in bringing your placemaking strategy to life with city dressing and other placemaking strategies designed to activate your space.

What do our customers say?

“Cambridge BID have worked with Field & Lawn for many years on various projects around the city centre. Their professionalism, attention to detail, and commitment to delivering high-quality installations is the reason we continue to work with them.”

"If you want high impact, public realm enhancing interventions and a service provider that is never going to let you down, Field and Lawn is the team you should go for."

"Field and Lawn exceeded our expectations with their customer service and professionalism during the installation."

"Working with Field and Lawn on the Ramadan Lights London project was a seamless experience. They were reliable, efficient, and delivered excellent service with professionalism."

Engagement. Meet wow-factor!

Field and Lawn are one of the UK’s leading supplier of city dressing installations to support place activation. We work with Local Authorities, Business Improvement Districts and Managing Agents to design, create and install city dressing solutions that are tailored to your growth and engagement objectives. Be that increasing economic engagement levels or creating a wow factor scheme that will draw people to your town or city centre to support local businesses. Our city dressing solutions are designed by expert creatives and installed by experienced professionals to deliver results.

Increasing dwell time with city dressing

Dwell time is the duration of time a person spends in a specific location or area, specifically in the context of retail and commercial areas such as high streets and shopping centres, it’s the length of time a shopper or visitor stays within your location. It is a key metric and closely linked to increased spend. The longer someone dwells, the more likely they are to spend or spend more. City dressing is one of the tools you can use to improve this metric and we have seen some exceptional results when our city dressing solutions have been used to not only increase dwell time but also drive positive sentiment and social sharing online.

Five tried and tested city dressing ideas

If you are looking to dress a city centre to improve dwell time, Field and Lawn have a wide range of solutions from simple outdoor flags to the most advanced experiential displays imaginable. The sky really is the limit.

1) Flags: Make a high-impact statement with our freestanding flagpoles, large format cross street flags or city-wide bunting. Flags can be produced in a range of sizes and materials and can be in place for several months

2) Street decorations: Street decorations within city dressing can include bespoke art installations, sculptural features, art trails, immersive and interactive displays. Street decorations are most commonly installed in high-footfall and key city centre gateways to maximise visibility, engagement and dwell time.

3) Lamp post banners: Designed to be installed onto lamp post arms, they can be both single and double format to improve impact. Bespoke messaging and branding can be included from promoting events to important public safety messaging.

4) Suspended displays: Suspended displays are most effective across pedestrian routes and key streets. Products like colour rain canopies and umbrella sky installations can provide a real impact. Suspended installations create a striking visual spectacle that draws visitors in.

5) Urban greening: Think branded planters, parklets and hanging baskets in spring and summer. Maintenance is a key consideration for this type of installation. A lower maintenance option is artificial products made from sustainable materials that can be stored and re-used year after year.

Compare your options and discover more

If you are looking to dress a city centre to improve dwell time, Field and Lawn have a wide range of solutions from simple outdoor flags to the most advanced experiential displays imaginable. The sky really is the limit.

A large scale outdoor placemaking display featuring colourful umbrellas

Transforming cities for major events

City-dressing is Widley adopted for major events, special occasions and festivals. Field and Lawn are experts in large scale, city wide transformations and smaller targeted city dressing schemes. We’ve provided Union Flags for Coronations, filled Regent Street with incredible pride flags and have carefully curated, high-impact installations to transform specific areas for entire seasons.

City dressing in action

How we transformed Cambridge city centre for summer

Field and Lawn worked with Cambridge BID to improve the city centre landscape on Green Street. A striking new installation has created a colourful and immersive canopy, using a beautiful colour rain product, in partnership with Impact Plan Art Productions. The installation forms part of their wider city dressing programme, to create a visually engaging experience that encourages people to stop, explore and spend more time in the area. Video credit, Cambridge BID.

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Seasonal and Christmas city dressing

City dressing can be used throughout the year, it’s a great way to uplift and change the look and feel of a destination during the darker months. A decorative city centre festive lighting scheme using festoon or overhead lighting in high footfall areas is a great option. Field and Lawn can provide both semi-permanent seasonal lighting and Christmas lighting for city centres. Field and Lawn specialise in designing and installing seasonal and Christmas city dressing, delivering cohesive, high-impact schemes that transform city centres during the most important trading periods. With experience across a wide range of city centre projects, we provide fully managed solutions, ensuring consistent, high-quality and safe displays that maximise seasonal revenue.