Office wall art in the UK, from City boardrooms to clinic corridors

The City's best-known collections were built over decades. Deutsche Bank shows over 4,000 works across its UK offices and unveiled four site-specific commissions at its new headquarters, 21 Moorfields, in September 2024. By 2017 Clifford Chance had gathered more than 1,400 limited-edition prints, spanning 270 years of British art, for the public floors of its Canary Wharf tower, and Simmons & Simmons has collected emerging artists since 1993, Gary Hume and Rachel Whiteread among them. One gallerist advising law firms in 2017 suggested Royal Academicians and Turner Prize nominees, bought with a five-to-ten-year view.

A fit-out keeps a shorter clock: a boardroom end wall, a run of meeting rooms, a long corridor and a fixed move-in date, all wanting paintings made to their size and to the palette of the carpet and joinery. Combine them: one named artist's work where clients arrive, canvases painted to order for every other wall. For headquarters, see corporate artwork for offices and boardrooms.

The British Council for Offices' 2014 guide put a new office at about 2.6–2.75 m from floor to ceiling, with 2.45 m accepted in a refurbishment; later editions nudged the minimum up. Hang a picture with its centre at about 145 cm, the usual height for a gallery wall, and a canvas 120 cm tall already reaches about 2.05 m, close to the lights and grilles of a suspended ceiling. Office walls are generous in width, so let width do the work:

Measure each wall between doors, glazing and fittings and send the figures with a photo; we suggest a size for each. Sizes for homes are in the UK size guide.

Many law firms, consultancies, clinics and private offices work from Georgian and Victorian buildings, from Mayfair to Edinburgh's New Town. Victorian rooms mostly sit between 2.7 and 3 m, and the grandest go higher, so a vertical canvas of 150–180 cm fits a principal room, hung from the picture rail where one survives, typically 300–450 mm below the ceiling.

In a listed building the walls themselves are protected. One estate agent's guide advises hanging pictures without nails or screws and, where a fixing is unavoidable, using the mortar joints rather than drilling the historic fabric; altering panelling or a chimney breast needs listed building consent. Cords have limits too: about 10 kg for a traditional cord, 25 kg or more for steel cable.

Art is part of the case for coming in. In a 2023 survey of hybrid workers in ten UK cities, commissioned by the landlord Brookfield Properties with The School of Life, 69% agreed that appealing workplace art adds to their wellbeing, and 75% of staff in the most art-rich offices preferred working on site, against 53% in plain ones. A landlord had reason to ask, but the lesson holds: team floors, kitchens and quiet rooms deserve paintings as much as reception does.

Those walls are shared by people of every background: in London's 2021 Census, a quarter of residents, 25.3%, followed a religion other than Christianity. Choose subjects that ask nothing of anyone, such as abstraction, British landscape and coast, cities, botanical studies and texture; leave slogans and nudes out of shared space, and keep religious imagery for rooms whose users have chosen it. Palettes and subjects in more depth: UK taste and styles.

Government and the NHS borrow first. The Government Art Collection holds more than 14,000 works, around 2,500 of them oil paintings, hung in several hundred buildings from Downing Street to regional offices and embassies. Paintings in Hospitals, the national arts-in-health collection, has about 1,290 works on loan to 72 hospitals, and more than 1,000 works from it and the Government Art Collection are going to NHS hospitals on free five-year loans, ahead of NHS Arts, planned for 2028.

Trusts' own arts teams commission too, often at architectural scale: Barts Health's Vital Arts commissioned a work for Newham Hospital's entrance that rises three storeys through the atrium. Private healthcare plans art in from the start; Cleveland Clinic London, an office building converted into a 184-bed hospital, was designed with art and warm finishes for a restorative setting.

Made-to-order canvases fill the walls a loan cannot reach: a GP or dental waiting room, a private clinic's consulting rooms, a university department's corridors, a ward that needs a series in one hand, in sky, water, meadow or soft texture. More in hospital artwork.

Offices often want art that could only hang in their building: the façade of a Georgian headquarters, the river from a Canary Wharf window, a converted Manchester mill, the firm's crest or its brand pattern. Send the image on WhatsApp with the wall size; we tell you how it will translate to canvas, suggest the size, palette and finish, and paint it once you are happy. You need to own the image or have permission to use it, and the design can stay exclusive to your firm if you ask before we start (see paintings from your own image).

We also paint hand-painted reproductions: a boardroom can hang a Constable or Turner landscape, long out of copyright, at the size of its wall, while a work still in copyright needs the rights holder's permission first.

The UK's large design-and-build firms take a floor from Cat A shell to Cat B finish, and their own accounts of the work rarely mention art, so it falls to the workplace manager, the designer or an art consultant (consultants, see art production for art consultants). Put it on the Cat B drawings beside the joinery and lighting, and it arrives with the furniture, not months after the move.

Send a plan or photographs of each wall with widths and the ceiling height. Usually within one business day you have sizes, a shortlist from some 1,300 catalogue designs or a design made for your project, and a price for each piece. Painting takes about 10 days, then 5–7 days by DHL, FedEx or UPS express; larger orders may go by air or sea freight, with the shipping cost confirmed before dispatch. Stage photographs go straight to whoever approves, and each canvas arrives labelled by floor and room with a packing list; we keep the codes on file for the next floor or office.

Stretched or framed arrives ready to hang, and textured or plaster work always travels that way.

Each canvas can travel stretched and ready to hang, framed, or rolled; a rolled canvas, the lightest and most economical way to send a large painting, arrives without stretcher bars, and any local framer can stretch it for you.