Gunpowder Mills
Cultural brand
London’s wild edge
Gunpowder Mills
Cultural brand
London’s wild edge
For over 300 years, the Gunpowder Mills has been one of Europe’s most important explosives sites. But after decades of declining visitor numbers, the team approached us to evolve a specialist heritage museum into a destination brand.
The vision: a new identity that opened this once-secret site to more visitors than ever before, helping restore historic buildings into new workspaces and creating new reasons to visit — all without losing this place’s unruly magic.
From specialist museum to local destination
Much of the Gunpowder Mills’ history — and future opportunity — lies across 175 acres of forgotten nature and industrial ruins. With ambitions to welcome more visitors, introduce new uses and become a destination for everyday exploration, the challenge was to unite its industrial heritage with its future as a place to work, discover and uncover its magic.
Our strategy found the opportunity in a rare combination of wilderness, invention and leisure, just beyond the economic and creative constraints of the city. Together they form: London’s wild edge.
This turned its position on the edge of London and Essex into a distinctive advantage, and shifted the narrative from preserving the Gunpowder Mills’ innovative spirit, to reawakening it.
A name that signals change
The existing name — Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills — carried history but was too unwieldy to support future ambitions. Yet it held deep resonance among volunteers and visitors, and testing with The Audience Agency revealed enduring excitement around ‘gunpowder’ for new and familiar audiences alike.
This gave us and the team the confidence to simplify the name to ‘Gunpowder Mills’ — signalling a new chapter while retaining the intrigue that made it distinctive. Paired with the locator Lee Valley, the new identity embedded the destination more firmly in one of the capital’s fastest-growing outdoor recreation corridors, helping place it on London’s mental map.
A design system that grows with the place
The Gunpowder Mills is full of curious architecture — monumental buttresses, mammoth walls and other fortified features designed to contain accidental explosions. Our choice of typography, Avec Stencil, draws on these robust forms, recalling an industrial past while subtle quirks give the brand a contemporary warmth.
Capturing the spirit of the place was central to telling its story, so we partnered with photographer Andy Mackie to create a distinctive photographic library rooted in the site’s unique atmosphere. Together, typography and photography grounded a design system gently overgrown with cyanotype imprints of nature and industrial textures. This was complemented by a colour palette drawn from the mossy tones of the forests and meadows, punctuated by chemical pops of coral, orange and electric blue.
We created a marque that embodied the spark of an idea, the happy doodle of child, and the excited scribble of a eureka moment.
The design system provides a framework for the identity of the Gunpowder Mills to grow over time, across heritage and culture, wilderness and workspaces.
A site rich in history
Atmospheric photography by Andy Mackie reveals the crumbling beauty of a place full of wild nature and curious stories — from a herd of deer roaming its ruins, to gunpowder ferried by boat rather than cart, to the one-legged stools once used to stop millers falling asleep on the watch.
A new era
In its first month, the reimagined Gunpowder Mills welcomed 1,275 visitors through its new entrance — met by a new website, a busy Easter event, and the return of the International Living History Festival, where 300 reenactors brought 2,000 years of history back to life. A new era for London’s wild edge.
