My firm, Lewis and Hickey Architects, have launched a new website today marking a new milestone in our extensive history.

We were originally founded in the City of London back in 1894 as W.A. Lewis. Our first commission from retailer M&S came in 1922 (and we’ve been working them ever since!). In 1930 Patrick Hickey joined the company and then in 1946 we became Lewis and Hickey. For many years we were a southern based practice, operating out of offices in central London and Guildford. In the 1990’s we merged with an existing practice in Edinburgh to form our Scottish office and formed our Prague office in Central Europe. We also had a Dublin office for a period of time, but this was later closed. In the 2000’s we established our offices in Nottingham, Manchester (via acquisition) and also Mumbai office in India.

Today we are ranked the “33rd Biggest practice in Britain” by the Architects Journal under their annual ‘AJ100’ rankings.

Our new website design is based around a central large image pane which illustrates the practices work in a wide range of sectors. The site has a clean, uncluttered and fresh aesthetic, with simple and intuitive navigation. The site is also ‘responsive’ so the format and navigation of the website changes automatically to suit the viewing device, such as tablets and smartphones.

I firmly believe that our new website is a positive step forward for us. It contains a lot of new content in terms of clients and projects. I believe it also conveys a much more contemporary impression of both our work and our business. The website will become an intrinsic part of our on-going media marketing now, especially through Twitter and LinkedIn.

The website aims to promote all aspects of our business, including our excellent geographical coverage, both in the UK and abroad from our seven offices.

Paul Miele, our Group Chief Executive has said; “This is another milestone for our business. Whilst we enjoy a superb heritage, our focus is very much on looking forward and we firmly believe that the website encapsulates this. We are a very diverse business and the new website will really reinforce this message, which we trust will allow us to expand work in new sectors, to further compliment sectors where we already have a strong profile”.

The website has been a personal project of mine. When I joined the Board of Directors just over a year ago, I decided that I would initiate and drive this project. Some great people have been instrumental in managing and contributing to this project, you know who you are, and I’m extremely grateful for your involvement.

A special mention must go to our Web Developers; the team at Black Apricot Creative. This is a young company, founded by a talented group of guys, who are passionate about what they do and pay attention to detail; both of these attributes are ones I appreciate and work by myself.

So, please go and have a little look at our shiny new website. I hope you enjoy it. Please keep re-visiting it as well because we’ll be updating it regularly with news and projects from around our business.