The Royal Exchange’s Christmas Lights Change Every Year. Its Real Emblem Has Watched for 460.

DESIGN TRAVEL · LONDON

Reading time: 8 min

Fier & Folk has wrapped the Royal Exchange’s eight Grade I listed columns in seven kilometres of gold LED lighting for Christmas 2025, a year on from the same building’s candy cane display. Both are temporary. The building’s actual Christmas decoration, a gilded grasshopper that has sat above its roofline since the sixteenth century, is not.

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Introduction

The Royal Exchange’s eight 30-metre columns are carrying seven kilometres of LED lighting this Christmas, arranged in vertical bands of gold that run the full height of the portico from 4 December 2025 to 4 January 2026. Inside, a Fortnum & Mason Christmas tree stands at the centre of the courtyard, and real spruce and pine dress the entrances. The design is by Fier & Folk, commissioned by The Ardent Companies, which has owned the retail element of the building since October 2022.

It is the second year running that Fier & Folk has designed the building’s Christmas display, after 2024’s candy cane columns. Carlin Fier, the agency’s founder, has described the brief plainly: to give the same eight columns “another exciting display,” this time built from light rather than colour. That detail, a design studio returning to the same architectural feature with a genuinely different idea, is a better way into the building than the display itself. The columns are the constant. What gets done to them changes annually. And forty feet above the pediment those columns support, a single decoration has not changed in almost 460 years.

A branding studio’s canvas is a building that has already survived two fires

The Royal Exchange has stood on this site, at the junction of Cornhill and Threadneedle Street, since Sir Thomas Gresham founded it as a centre for London’s merchants. Queen Elizabeth I opened the first building on 23 January 1571, granting it the right to call itself “Royal” and to trade in the valuable goods an ordinary market could not. Gresham modelled it directly on the Antwerp Bourse, the world’s first purpose-built exchange, on the advice of his factor Richard Clough.

That first building burned down in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Its replacement, designed by Edward Jarman, lasted until 10 January 1838, when it too burned, in a fire reportedly visible from Windsor, twenty-four miles away. The building standing today is the third: Sir William Tite won an 1839 to 1840 design competition to rebuild it, and Queen Victoria opened his neoclassical structure on 28 October 1844. Historic England lists it Grade I, citing it as the symbolic centre of the City’s commercial life as much as for its architectural quality, a rich, heavy Portland stone building arranged around what was originally an open courtyard for merchants to trade in.

That courtyard is now covered by a cast iron and glass roof, and the shopfronts arcaded around it hold Tiffany & Co, Hermès, Bremont and Fortnum & Mason among other tenants. Ardent’s acquisition in October 2022, from Oxford Properties, covers 51,400 square feet of that retail space, directly opposite the Bank of England. The eight columns Fier & Folk has wrapped in light this year form the building’s western portico, the part of Tite’s 1844 design most visible from the street, and the part every Christmas display at the Royal Exchange has used as its starting point.

Seventeen merchants in stone, above the columns now wrapped in light

The pediment those columns support is not decoration. It is a sculpture, 4.5 metres high and 27 metres wide, carved by Richard Westmacott the Younger and completed in 1844 alongside the rest of Tite’s building. It was Westmacott’s only major public commission in London, and its subject is exactly what the building was built for: Commerce, personified as a crowned female figure holding a charter of exchange and a ship’s rudder, surrounded by seventeen figures representing merchants and traders from across the world Britain traded with in the 1840s, Turkish, Armenian, Greek, Indian, Chinese, Persian and British among them. The stone base carries a line from Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof.”

It is worth knowing that sculpture is there, directly above the columns currently carrying Fier & Folk’s lighting, because it changes what the display is actually illuminating. The columns are not a blank architectural feature chosen for convenience. They are the plinth for a specific nineteenth-century argument about London as the centre of world trade, and every design placed on them since has had to work within that frame, whether or not the design itself makes anything of it.

The one decoration that never changes

Above the pediment, on top of the building’s clock tower, sits a gilded grasshopper weathervane. It is not part of this year’s display, or any year’s. It has been there, in one form or another, since the sixteenth century, because it is Thomas Gresham’s own crest.

The story usually told is that an ancestor, Roger de Gresham, was abandoned as an infant in the Norfolk marshes and was only found after a passer-by heard a grasshopper chirruping nearby, which is how the insect entered the family’s coat of arms. A more likely explanation, and one the building’s own historians favour, is simpler: a pun on Gresham and grass. Either way, the grasshopper survived the fire of 1838 that destroyed the second Royal Exchange entirely, and it has watched over every subsequent Christmas display from above, including this one. A pendant grasshopper sign a few streets away on Lombard Street, dated 1563 and marked with Gresham’s own initials, shows how thoroughly he stamped the symbol across this corner of the City in his own lifetime. Nobody covering this year’s lighting has mentioned it, but it is the one fixed point the display’s designers are working underneath every time they choose a new idea for the columns below it.

What changed between last year’s candy canes and this year’s gold

Fier & Folk was founded in 2022 by Carlin Fier, who had previously spent three years as head of brand at Battersea Power Station and eight years in marketing and communications at Brookfield before that. The agency describes itself as a boutique operation built around property and place branding, and its client list beyond the Royal Exchange includes Battersea Power Station itself, 50 Fenchurch, Principal Place and 100 Bishopsgate, all City and London developments with the same underlying problem: how to give a large, fixed building a changing identity across a calendar of seasons and events.

That is the context for the shift from 2024 to 2025. Last year’s columns were dressed as candy canes, a literal, high-colour piece of festive imagery. This year’s seven kilometres of LED lighting run in continuous vertical bands of gold up all eight columns, a more architectural response that uses the verticality Tite built into the portico rather than working against it. Fier has described the brief as building on “last year’s successful candy cane columns” with “another exciting display,” which is a reasonable way to describe swapping a figurative motif for one that reads the structure underneath it. Andrew Hilston, managing director of The Ardent Companies, has framed the display as part of positioning the Royal Exchange within “the Square Mile’s foremost line up of luxury shopping,” which is the commercial case for doing this at all: a landmark building competing every December with Oxford Street, Regent Street and Covent Garden for a visitor’s attention, using its own architecture rather than borrowed festive iconography to do it.

Why a light show has to answer to a pediment

The design question worth asking about a seasonal installation like this is not whether it looks good in a photograph. It is whether the studio designing it has actually read the building it is working on. Wrapping eight Corinthian columns in candy stripes is a choice that could be made on almost any colonnade in any city. Running gold light vertically up the same eight columns, echoing both their proportions and, whether by design or coincidence, the gilding on the grasshopper thirty metres above them, is a choice that only makes sense on this specific building.

That is the standard a temporary Christmas display sets for itself the moment it is placed on a Grade I listed building with a sculpted pediment and a five-century-old weathervane. The Royal Exchange’s architecture is not neutral. It has already survived two fires and been rebuilt each time in the same spirit, a building whose entire pediment is a public argument about commerce and whose roofline still carries the personal emblem of the man who built the first version of it in 1565. A studio taking on its Christmas lighting is not decorating a blank facade. It is adding one more temporary layer to a building that has spent 460 years accumulating them.

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Final thoughts

Fier & Folk’s gold columns will come down in early January, the way the candy canes came down last year and whatever replaces the gold will come down the January after that. The grasshopper will still be there. It was there for the fire that took the second Royal Exchange down in an afternoon, and it has been there for every Christmas display since Tite’s building reopened in 1844, including a decade of them designed by studios nobody now remembers. That is the actual argument a building like this makes every December, whether or not the studio decorating it says so out loud: the columns can carry a different idea every year precisely because the building underneath them, and the four-and-a-half-centuries-old crest above them, is not going anywhere.