For a year and a half my walk to work went past the same building site. First it was a car park. Then a very big hole. Then steel, loads of it, and a crane I started nodding to like a neighbour. The whole time, the site was wrapped in tall wooden hoardings, and the hoardings were covered in pictures of what was coming.
Six storeys of pale brick. Every window glowing. A café on the ground floor with people outside, coffee in hand, laughing at something. A couple of big leafy trees that looked like they’d been there since the Victorians.
Twice a day, every day, I walked past that. And at some point I stopped thinking of it as a picture. In my head, that was just what the corner looked like. So when the hoardings finally came down last spring it was a properly odd moment, like meeting someone in person after months of video calls.
It was close, I’ll give them that. Same brick, same windows. A unit on the ground floor, though it opened as a phone repair shop, not a café. The trees were twigs tied to wooden stakes. The brick was a shade more orange. And nobody was sitting outside, because it was March, in the north, and we’re not daft.
So who makes these things?
I got curious and asked a mate who works at an architects’ practice. Turns out it usually isn’t the architects. They design the building and do the drawings. Then a specialist studio takes those drawings and makes the glossy pictures you see on hoardings, websites and planning documents.
It’s a lot more work than I’d assumed. They build the whole building in 3D, properly, down to window frames and the lines between the bricks. Then it gets dropped into the real street, either a 3D model of it or an actual photo. They pick a time of day and a time of year, add materials and planting and cars and people, and then render it. My mate reckons a decent architectural visualisation company can spend days fiddling with one view, nudging the light, tweaking the brick, until you can’t tell it from a photograph. A normal scheme might get a dozen images, each from a spot where real people will see the building. The bus stop. The end of the road. The kitchen window of the flats across the street.
The bit that surprised me was who they’re for. I’d assumed it was all sales, shifting flats and letting shop units. That’s some of it. But the same pictures go into planning applications, where councillors use them to decide whether a building fits the street. And into consultations, which is where people living nearby get their first real look. My mate’s practice once dropped a whole block by a floor after residents saw the images and pointed out it would put a row of back gardens in shade all afternoon.
Reading the hoardings like a pro
Once you know how they’re made, you start spotting things. It’s a decent way to pass a walk to work, honestly.
Check the weather. It’s always a bright afternoon, usually late spring or early autumn, with low warm light. Brick loves that light. Windows glow in it. Not a lie, exactly. Just the building on its very best day.
Check the trees. Studios tend to show planting as it’ll look in ten years, big and full. You get the twigs on stakes at the start. Give it a few summers and the picture slowly catches up, which is quite a nice thing to watch if you walk the same way every day.
Check the people. There are always loads, all relaxed, all having a lovely time. Dog walkers, couples, someone on a bike. They tell you the mood the developer is going for. They don’t tell you much about the street.
Check the angle. Somebody chose that view. If the block looks tall and slim from one corner, go and have a look from the other side once it’s up.
Check what isn’t there. Wheelie bins. White vans on the kerb. Delivery riders. Scaffolding on the place next door. Real cities are cluttered, and pictures quietly tidy that away.
Why I’ve come round to them
I’ll be honest, I started out a bit sniffy. A shiny picture of a building that doesn’t exist, full of people who don’t exist either? Felt like a sales trick. I even caught myself muttering at one on the way past, which is not a great look at half eight in the morning.
But think about the alternative. Without those images, most of us wouldn’t know what was going up until it was finished, and by then complaining is pointless. A good visualisation is pretty much the only chance normal people get to react while a building is still on paper. The block on my corner lost a storey during planning, and according to my mate that was partly down to neighbours seeing the pictures and kicking off about the view from their back bedrooms.
A year on
The building’s been open about a year now. The phone repair shop left and a café moved in, more or less like the hoardings promised. The twigs are slightly less twiggy. One warm evening in August I walked past and there were actually people sitting outside with drinks, looking almost exactly like the picture I’d stared at for eighteen months. Almost. One bloke was eating chips out of the paper, and I don’t reckon any studio would’ve thought of that.
