How do you fill a 300,000 sq ft office in the heart of London’s evolving financial district? Easily. Or at least that is the hope of Stanhope and Mitsui Fudosan, the team behind the recently completed Angel Court, EC2.
The 24-storey building is divided into garden floors and sky floor. Rents starts at around £65 per sq ft and rising to circa £85 per sq ft for the top levels, which offer uninterrupted 360-degree views across London. The seventh floor also features a garden terrace with a communal area accessible to all tenants.
The long-term partners have so far secured tenants for around 50% of the building, including all the retail and leisure space and around 30% of the offices, with a further 15-20% under offer.
EG revealed in November that the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank had placed one of the 8,500 sq ft sky floors under offer for its first overseas office. Further occupiers include financial data management firm RIMES Technologies (8,500 sq ft) and BUPA (60,000 sq ft).
Stanhope chief executive David Camp said he was not concerned about the impact of uncertainty in the financial sector on the partnership’s ability to fill the building. “We’ve got a lot of banking interest, but also key occupier interest coming from West End and consultant/advisory business looking at it,” he said. The historic boundaries of different occupier markets in London are also fading. “The villages of central London are long gone except for maybe the insurance district, which is still a bit unique,” Camp says.
“So, we’re finding right across London it’s quality of accommodation. The amenity which goes with it is almost always top of the list with occupiers because they’re obviously very conscious that employees are footloose and fancy free these days, so they’ve got to have the best possible accommodation but also the price point as well.”
Restaurants secured for the scheme include Tandoori-style barbecue restaurant Temper, Peruvian restaurant Coya, The Natural Kitchen and coffee, food and wine bar Notes.
Eiichiro Onozawa, managing director of Mitsui Fudosan UK, says the Japanese firm remains confident about the UK market. “It’s the fifth-largest economy in the world. It has very strong and sound fundamentals.
“There’s no reason to be concerned about it, other than to say there are fluctuations in the market, and that happens anywhere in the world.”
Angel Court was designed to be a “timeless” building, rather than a “statement” building. “It has a timeless aspect to it,” Onozawa says. “More often than not, buildings try to be a statement or an icon, and we weren’t really trying to achieve that. A building lasts for 50, 60,100 years, so it’s really important that a building is accepted within a neighbourhood and is part of the landscape.”
GM Real Estate, Cushman & Wakefield and JLL are joint leasing agents on Angel Court.
Office space on the building’s Sky Floors
Garden terrace on the 7th floor
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