Running between Grosvenor Square and Oxford Street, North Audley Street plays a key role as a gateway into the Mayfair Estate. Publica’s temporary scheme enhances this entrance to Mayfair by creating a space that feels welcoming and inclusive and supports the many food and hospitality destinations that animate North Audley Street.

The proposal includes the widening of footways and a reduction of parking and loading to allow restaurants to spill out onto the street and to facilitate social distancing and more comfortable pedestrian movement.

Alongside the highways works, Publica worked with landscape designer Alexandra Noble to explore design options using planters and greening to define outdoor dining “rooms” to support hospitality venues and create tranquil dining destination spaces. All plants were selected to be robust, drought resistant, and to protect pollinators such as hoverflies, bees and butterflies to maximise biodiversity. After-dark, subtle and bespoke foliage designs are projected onto façades at street corners. Battery-powered LED spotlights were also issued to tenants as part of an experimental pilot, which encourages a collective effort to illuminate trees to frame seating areas outside each premises each evening.

Publica is currently working with Grosvenor and Westminster City Council to make these improvements permanent, introducing substantial green and blue infrastructure such as enhanced SuDS features, new planting edges, and extended Yorkstone paving.