Bond Street celebrates festive season with spectacular illumination

London's Bond Street turned on its holiday lights Thursday night at 5:25 pm in honour of the upcoming festive season.

This year's illumination installation was inspired by the late 18th century “Bond Street Loungers,” dapper men who walked the streets and became the early “peacocks” of their time. The New West End Company's Bond Street Development Group delved deep into the archives to explore the history of the street for its 2014 holiday lights.

The 1 million pound holiday lighting installation set up has been build up around these “gentlemen” of the era and features large white peacocks and feathers as its focus theme.

Bond Street celebrates heritage with festive light installation

“There are so many beautiful London illuminations, but with this year’s Bond Street lights we wanted to do something really unique to celebrate the enchanting heritage of the world’s most renowned luxury destination,” commented Beverley Aspinall, the managing director at Bond Street Development Group.

“Bringing to life the 300 year old tale of The Bond Street Loungers has given us the inspiration for a truly spectacular lighting display but more importantly we have been able to resurrect and have fun with a small portion of the remarkable history behind Bond Street.”

Castros, the lighting design company behind Bond Street's festive lights took on a 12 man team to install over 250,000 LED lights and cables, which cover the length of Bond Street 14 times. The lighting team reportedly spend 5,000 hours creating the large lighting fixtures for the retail street, which were based on peacock feathers.

“These days all men are dandies – I think it is a real generational thing, you look at young guys today and they are all interested in fashion, they all care how they look, and they all expect to be surprised when they go shopping,” said Dylan Jones, Editor of GQ about Bond Street's lighting inspiration.

“I think it used to be assumed that men didn’t really like shopping but men are far more sophisticated now – they shop more like women – the man you will see walking up and down Bond Street is far more sophisticated than he would have been 10 or 20 years ago."

Established as a retail street in 1686, Bond Street has expanded since its early days and is currently home to 80 luxury labels. The festive light scheme is part of Bond's Street re-development plan, announced earlier this year, which will see an investment of over 20 million pounds to improve the street.

The re-development plan aims to increase in pedestrian space on the street by 50 percent and expand on-street parking, whilst upgrading the look with new lighting, signage and public art installations. There will also be some re-landscaping of the public oasis between New and Old Bond Street.

Bond Street's Christmas lights are set to welcome visitors from over 100 countries around the world to its retailers over the next few weeks.