Playing Monopoly with a giant Plunge creation

To celebrate 90 years of the iconic Monopoly board game, the Royal Mint released a limited-edition 50p coin and asked us to bring one of the game's most recognisable playing pieces to life.

A giant silver top hat became the centrepiece of an event that transformed the streets of London into a real-life game of chance. Members of the public were challenged to spot the hat, snap a photo of it and then share it on social media for the chance to win one of the Monopoly themed coins.

To complete the illusion that London had become a life-sized board game, we also created giant playing cards for Trafalgar Square, Oxford Street, Piccadilly and Leicester Square. 

Producing a top hat sounded wonderfully simple but when you're recreating something so instantly recognisable, the detail is everything. Every curve, every angle and every proportion of the hat had to be spot on. 

We began by fabricating the hidden structure that would make the whole project possible, balancing weight, strength and stability before thinking about how it would look. It's the sort of engineering that nobody notices, and that's exactly the point.

With the framework complete, it was time to build the hat itself. For this, we used Zote, one of our favourite materials due to it being lightweight, durable and perfect for creating clean, sculptural forms without adding unnecessary weight. Large sections were carefully cut, bonded and shaped around the framework to create the iconic silhouette. 

Rather than simply painting the hat, we wrapped the entire piece in a stretchy holographic silver fabric and the result was a giant top hat with a soft metallic shimmer that catches the light as it moves.

When we set out to make props at Plunge, we don’t just think about what our creations look like, we have to make them resilient too. Sometimes they need to be able to endure hours of wear, and in this case, navigate busy London streets being photographed from every angle - all the while looking as though they had just jumped straight off the Monopoly board. For this project, one of our dedicated prop makers followed the hat around London making sure the wearer was comfortable at all times.

Thankfully, this top hat never landed on "Go to Jail". It passed every challenge, collected plenty of admiring glances along the way and, unlike most of us after a long day in London, finished the journey looking as polished as it started.