Update on the Imperial Hotel renovation at Russell Square

Let's cut the chase* – oh dear, it's as I feared. Here is an update about the renovation of this marvellous example of 1960's architecture.It used to look like this, giving luxury airport vibes:In my previous post I had written that I had been told that the orange letters (Eurostile/Microgramma with gilded outlines and recessed centres) would be reinstated. Er. No. A few weeks ago I noticed that much of the scaffolding had been removed. I snapped this image:Here we can see that he orange letters have been replaced with some boring blocky letters that I'm pretty sure are from a typeface, a font, created for web use. The twelve letters (inc wd #) is now crammed into a panel that before contained just five letters.It's just THE IMPERIAL now. The word HOTEL has been dropped. Hello cabbie, take me to The Imperial. Perhaps they then get driven to the war museum or the college, ha ha!A closer look:Check out the strange choice of letterform here, especially that ugly letter M which is overly…