Cheapside Bus Gate

Cheapside has been a bus gate since 2020. For years, the widened pavement space created by the restriction was held in reserve — functional, but unfinished. The City of London Corporation’s Pedestrian Priority Streets Programme finally makes it permanent, and uses the opportunity to ask what that space should actually do for the people who use it every day.

EGY provided street furniture design and sustainable drainage design for the scheme, which runs along Cheapside in the vicinity of the bus gate at Milk Street. The works widen the pavements on both sides of the street, introduce new seating and planting, and raise the road level to improve accessibility across one of the Square Mile’s most heavily trafficked pedestrian routes. The drainage design needed to support the planting ambition without compromising the pavement build-up or the existing below-ground infrastructure in a part of the City that has been continuously built and rebuilt for centuries.

Permanence and place

The bus gate restriction changed how Cheapside felt before anyone had designed anything. Overnight, a street that had been dominated by through traffic became quieter, slower, and usable in a different way. The design work that followed had to respect and build on that shift rather than simply fill the space with furniture. The planters introduce climate-resilient shrubs and planting to a street that has historically had almost none. They provide shade on a south-facing corridor that heats significantly in summer. The seating creates reason to stop on a street that most people have always moved through without pausing.

Works began on site in June 2026, delivered in phases by FM Conway to keep both sides of the pavement accessible throughout. The project is on programme to complete within the Pedestrian Priority Streets Programme timeline.