The Lantern

The Lantern

By: Rowan Thackray
In: Commissions Commercial
2 min read
A glazed retail arcade in Leeds for Marchbank Developments, shot across three days to catch the roof doing something different in each of them.
ClientMarchbank Developments
ArchitectKilmany Architects
DeveloperMarchbank Developments
Other collaboratorsFenwick Estates (letting), Struan Engineering
Completed2026
PhotographedMarch 2026
The entrance to a glazed retail arcade seen from the street
The street entrance. The barrel reads against the sky from about thirty metres out.
Looking straight up into a structural glass roof with the steel ribs receding
Straight up. Forty-one ribs, and they are not identical.
The roof is the product. Everything else in the building is there so the roof has something to stand on, and every frame here is arranged around that.
A stair and escalator hall in pale stone and brass with people ascending at distance
The stair hall. Pale stone, brass handrail, and the roof still doing the lighting.
A café spilling out onto the arcade floor with tables, planting and people seated at distance
Mid-morning on the second day. The tables were not moved for this.

The grid of light the roof throws onto the stone floor travels about four metres between ten and two, which nobody had drawn and everybody noticed once it was built. Three of these frames are the same standpoint at different hours, and the shopfronts were never the subject — an arcade photographed for its retail units dates the moment a tenant changes.

The junction where a glass roof lands on a stone parapet with sunlight through it
Where the glass lands on the parapet. The whole roof sits on this detail.
The arcade in the late afternoon with shopfront glazing softly lit and people walking
Late afternoon, third day. Warm rather than dusk — this is not a blue-hour building.