The London Design Festival, which ran from September 12 to 20, placed a striking temporary pavilion at the centre of its 2026 edition. Positioned on the Strand near Somerset House and India House, The Pangolin Shield was designed by Studio Saar, led by Ananya Singhal, in collaboration with structural engineers Atelier One, whose founder Neil Thomas worked on the structure. It served as one of the festival’s Landmark Projects, the large-scale commissions that give the citywide event its most visible moments.
The structure is built from a bamboo gridshell reinforced with steel fasteners and wrapped in two types of shield. The base layer uses traditional Indian police shields made from lathi, or bamboo sticks, while the upper layer is formed from knups, the woven rain shields traditionally used by farmers in the Meghalaya region of north-east India. The layered covering references the pangolin, described as the world’s most trafficked mammal, and the design pairs traditional craft with computational modelling.
Singhal linked the design to the history between Britain and India. “The police shields were designed by the British colonial rulers to keep riots down in India all those years ago,” he said, adding that turning them into part of a structure that shelters visitors carried its own meaning. The pavilion invited passers-by to step beneath it, framing a difficult shared history through craft and public space rather than through a museum display.
The installation formed part of a festival now in its 24th year, spread across 11 design districts including Shoreditch, Brompton, Mayfair, Chelsea and Bankside, and drawing more than 600,000 visitors. Mayor Sadiq Khan called London’s design sector “an international success story” and described the festival as “an incredible advert, drawing international attention, investment and visitors.” Organisers cited £2.2 million of public investment over a decade generating £1.23 billion in returns.
Elsewhere across the programme, the V&A presented an exhibition titled Awakenings exploring the relationship between craft and technology, while its Craft x Tech project paired international designers with Japanese artisans working in techniques such as cloisonné enamel and shibori textiles. A Victorian power station in Wapping, closed to the public for years, hosted a sound installation, and designer Es Devlin delivered a keynote at the festival’s Global Design Forum. The festival closed on September 20.
