Law firm A&O Shearman has agreed to take 100,000 sq ft at British Land and GIC’s 1 Broadgate development in the heart of the City.
The law firm joins JLL in the building. JLL agreed to move its HQ to 1 Broadgate, EC2, in 2021, signing a 15-year lease for 134,000 sq ft. It will take occupation from 2026.
British Land and GIC were granted planning to develop the 32-acre site next to Liverpool Street early in 2019.
Designed by AHMM, the building comprises 546,000 sq ft, with 498,000 sq ft of workspace, 47,000 sq ft of roof terraces and 48,000 sq ft of retail and leisure. Enabling works are under way, with demolition due to start in May 2021.
Activity among the legal firms has been something of a fillip for the office market over the past few years. Recent data from Savills showed that 40% of legal firms across the EMEA region had expanded their office space during the first half of the year, with the UK capital registering the third-highest legal transaction volume, behind Paris and Brussels.
US firms drove much of the activity in London as they sought to increase their share of the city’s legal market. The knock-on effect was that British firms sought to expand elsewhere and secondary cities, such as Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow, benefitted as a result.
The A&O Shearman letting was announced in a trading update from the REIT earlier this week, in which it focused largely on its £441m acquisition of a portfolio of retail parks from Brookfield.
British Land chief executive Simon Carter said that across the wider BL business trading was going well with a “good level of leasing in the period and cost discipline underpinning our profit performance”.
He said he expected portfolio values to be marginally up for the half year, with continued ERV growth across the portfolio.
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