Town Hall Hotel — Brand positioning and visual identity for a luxury London landmark
Brand strategy · Positioning · Visual identity · Brand rollout
Hotels and hospitality · London
The context
Town Hall Hotel occupies a restored Edwardian town hall in Bethnal Green. It’s Grade II listed, the original council chamber is still intact, and it remains one of the more distinctive buildings in East London.
The hotel is a member of Design Hotels and part of Unlisted Collection, and is also home to Da Terra, Rafael Cagali’s two-Michelin-starred restaurant.
When I started working with the hotel, very little of that was reflected in who was actually booking it.
The challenge
Most guests were choosing Town Hall Hotel for where it was rather than what it was.
Being a comfortable, well-run hotel within easy reach of the City is a perfectly good business. But it meant one of the hotel’s biggest assets, the building itself, wasn’t really doing anything commercially.
Leisure travellers choosing East London because they wanted to experience East London were going elsewhere, often to hotels with less history and architecture but a much stronger point of view.
That matters commercially. A hotel chosen mainly for convenience is much more likely to compete on price. A hotel people actively want to experience has a different opportunity.
The approach
The question underneath everything was whether Town Hall Hotel was a hotel in an interesting building, or a cultural destination that happened to have rooms.
That distinction shaped a lot more than the marketing. It affected who we wanted to attract, how we talked about the hotel, the role of food and drink, the kind of events and partnerships that made sense, and ultimately the experience we wanted guests to have.
We settled on the second.
Heritage stopped being something we simply talked about and became the foundation of the brand. The building wasn’t just the backdrop anymore. It became one of the main reasons to come.
The work
I started with the positioning and wider brand strategy, built around the idea of history reimagined for the modern traveller, with a more lifestyle-led brand world rooted in East London.
The visual identity was refined rather than replaced, drawing details from the original council chamber and combining them with contemporary typography and a restrained colour palette.
I developed a new tone of voice that felt warmer, more editorial and more relevant to the type of guest the hotel wanted to attract.
I also looked at the wider brand architecture, particularly how the hotel’s food and drink offer could operate as destinations in their own right without feeling disconnected from Town Hall Hotel. That included Silkweaver, the cocktail bar identity I created in 2021, which has since evolved into the Assembly Lounge.
From there, the thinking started to influence the wider guest experience and content. We introduced in-room partnerships with local makers and East London roasters, cultural programming including an on-site photography exhibition, and shifted the content away from simply showing interiors towards lifestyle, people and discovering the local area.
The impact
Five years on, I’m still working with Town Hall Hotel.
For me, one of the clearest signs that the positioning has worked is how far it has travelled beyond the marketing.
The hand soaps in the lobby and bathrooms come from a Hackney maker. Dog treats left in the rooms come from another local independent. A photography exhibition by Oasis’s tour photographer ran at the hotel and brought in people who otherwise had no reason to be in Bethnal Green that week.
Those might sound like small details, but collectively they show that the positioning is influencing actual decisions within the hotel, rather than just the way it presents itself.
A positioning that only exists on the website isn’t particularly useful. When it starts influencing partnerships, programming and the guest experience, you know it’s been properly adopted.
The commercial impact can also be seen in the parts of the business the building was always particularly well suited to.
Weddings have become a significant part of the offer, with couples choosing the hotel because of the character of its rooms and spaces. Christmas has developed into a wider programme of banquets, menus and events alongside hotel stays.
My work with Town Hall Hotel has grown with it, from the original positioning and identity into ongoing messaging, guest experience, campaigns and the collateral that brings everything together.
Tell me about your project
If you're running a hotel with more character than its guest profile reflects, that's usually a positioning question before it's a marketing one. Tell me where you are and I'll come back to you within a working day.