Production designer Debbie Burton was keen to ensure that this was London as we’d never seen it before. “I didn’t want the Shard in the background of every shot, for example,” she explains. “London is much more interesting than that. It’s a city where historic architecture – whether Georgian, Victorian or neoclassical – exists alongside glass and steel, and finding locations where those worlds could exist together became a really useful visual reference.”
When it came to finding the perfect locations for the law firms, she thought about what each represented, and how that would translate to where they worked. “Initially, what was on the page – and what became clearer through research and preparing the pitch – was that there were two very different law firms and two very different worlds,” she says. “Cathcarts represented old-established heritage: a firm that had existed for hundreds of years and had been passed down through generations. It felt cloistered and secretive. Taylor & Byrne, on the other hand, was much more about openness, transparency and light. It was an obvious visual contrast between the two worlds.”
For Cathcarts, she settled on a Victorian exterior, with a more Art Deco interior. “It wasn’t necessarily claustrophobic, but there was a sense of being enclosed,” she explains. “The idea was that the footprint of the building remained consistent across several floors, so we could create the impression that we were moving through this one large world.”
