JOURNAL OF THE LONDON SOCIETY 2021
Richard Upton, chief executive of U+I, argues that while London’s centre will survive, it is the city’s outer reaches that will provide much opportunity too At U+I, for example, we’re looking for a new home. Something smaller that is designed to cultivate collaborative working rather than the usual rows of desks, a space that goes above and beyond usual office expectations. Remote working – at home or in shared workspace locations – will be for focused work and the office for the buzz of collaboration, creativity and innovation.
Walking the streets of central London during the last weeks and months has been a strange experience. Places so familiar, devoid of their bustle; the crowds gone; shops and restaurants closed. In Victoria, where U+I is based, we have seen and felt the impact of the pandemic on central London and at times it’s been hard to comprehend. It is all too easy to get sucked into a vortex of doom and gloom, but we must remember that there is light at the end of the tunnel in the form of vaccines and the second half of 2021 looks brighter as a result.
Importantly, we will still have an office in central London – we are just rethinking how we will use it. We think this will be the case for most businesses: demand for offices in central locations will remain, but occupiers will look at using the space differently, with a premium placed on well-designed workspace with great public realm, parks and amenities, as well as high levels of sustainability, wellbeing and connectivity.
So let’s focus on that future and ask what the opportunities are for London as a result of the pandemic. How will the shape of our city change? Certainly, enormous damage has been wrought on urban centres across the country – and in London these are some of the UK’s most famous and wellloved retail and leisure destinations. It isn’t only the impact of the lockdowns that has caused damage, but also the ongoing absence in between of the critical mass of office workers that is the lifeblood of many central London businesses.
Where we expect to see more wide-ranging change is in the outer London locations that have been a little less feted in the past. In 2020, it was already clear that for all the talk of retail dying and high streets on their last legs, suburban and fringe locations in London were faring far better than places in the centre. In many of these locations, places like Bromley and Hayes where we have largescale regeneration schemes, footfall rebounded quickly after the first lockdown, as all those commuters now working from home rediscovered their local area.
Even so, I have no doubt central London will recover, the ‘death of the office’ narrative that drives a lot of the doommongering around the future of our great city has been overdone. The ‘future of work’ is not this urgent and necessary experiment in remote working that we have been living through. It is something smarter, hybrid and more agile that will keep an office at its heart.
We expect this again to be the case again in 2021 as restrictions lift and more flexible and hybrid working arrangements endure. The ‘shop local’ mantra that has helped many smaller businesses through the 40
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