Opening onto a small side road between Oxford Circus and Great Portland Street, the front of Aquatic Designs is modest and discreet with little to suggest that this is in fact one of London’s weirdest and most intriguing destinations.
Inside, it’s a different story. Ducking through to the dim interior, visitors are bought face to face with an astonishing range of water life. Tanks stacked floor to ceiling house goldfish, spotted fish, small black fish, narrow fish with sucker-mouths, white fish, neon fish, water snails, and pondweed. Hidden down below these, glass fronts at shin-height screen more exotic creatures: large flat fish pass by gloomily by shoppers’ ankles and in one corner, a melancholy turtle with a long sinuous neck stares out.
Downstairs, the scene becomes still more surreal. Twilit and full of corners, passages twist between simmering tanks. Visitors are flanked on all sides by thickets of coral undulating silently, red starfish and seahorses that float eerily sideways with unblinking eyes.
This is as much a smaller, denser version on the London Aquarium as a place to buy goldfish.
As well as selling fish, Aquatic Design are among the world’s leading designers of water features. They cater internationally for private homes, offices, shopping centres and TV and film sets. They take showers, living rooms, bedrooms and fireplaces and fill them with fish. The designers work alongside other architects and engineers to build precise and sophisticated creations. They’ve done the O2 shopping centres, the oyster bar at Harrods and they keep the waters of channel 4 well stocked.
The staff are absolute specialists in their field, rich in aquatic knowledge and architects of water display. They also like a challenge. Right now, some of their salient designers are in the finishing stages of putting together a 7000 litre tank for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s upcoming production of Twelfth Night in Stratford-Upon-Avon.
Of course, not everyone is looking to hand out hundreds in order to fill their homes and offices with fish, but for the regular civilian, this is beside the point. The shop is worth a visit as a spectacle in its own right. Peculiar, rainbow coloured and deeply cinematic, it’s a world away from Topshop, John Lewis and Starbucks.
107-109 Great Portland Street
London, Greater London
W1W 6QG
020 7580 6764
aquaticdesign.co.uk
Aquatic Designs
Peculiar, rainbow coloured and deeply cinematic, it’s a world away from Topshop, John Lewis and Starbucks
This article is connected to The Aquatic Design Centre
Published Jul 16, 2012