Regional Insight: Is the City fringe a role model for the UK as a whole?

In contrast to the sleek lines and imposing grandeur of the City or the West End, the City fringe had felt like the capital’s altogether more bohemian relative – a cousin that grew its hair and laughed at conventional office rules about giant floor plates and tinted glass and just did its own thing, with remarkable success, in the thick brick warehouse space left behind long ago by the textile industry. But what if, rather than being an outlier, the City fringe is actually a role model for the rest of the country? As the post-pandemic world figures out what it actually wants the office to be, could the City fringe and its colourful, characterful buildings be a shining example of how employers can tempt staff back to the workplace? It is a view that Oli Cohen, partner at City fringe specialist agency Belcor, certainly agrees with: “This needs to be the case study for where the market is going and how office space should look. The days of occupiers just wanting four walls and a desk just aren’t there anymore.” Cohen believes that, for many, the office is no longer a necessity and that companies simply looking to save money will do so via homeworking. However, he also believes that offices are crucial to collaboration and creativity, so the solution for employers serious about luring workers back is to bring elements of homeworking with them. “The office is definitely a want, it’s not a need, and you now need to attract companies in by making the office space really cool, in some ways having almost a merge between office space and the home,” he says.  The key to achieving this, Cohen believes, is in attention to small details and in daring to be different. “We are taking spaces one step further now by actually dressing them to create much more of a warm atmosphere,” says Cohen. “All our advice to clients pre-pandemic was, ‘You should go and fit your space – to stand out from the crowd you’ll need a fitted office space.’ But fast-forward to now and the pandemic has massively accelerated that trend, and actually what we are finding is that nine out of ten spaces are fitted.  “So, if you’re a tenant looking around these spaces, a lot of them look pretty similar. You start looking at one fitted space and they’re all fitted out the same. Our main USP and how we are really advising clients is, ‘You need to be the office space that stands out from the crowd – you need to be that one in ten that looks different, that feels different.” This focus within the City fringe is something Cohen believes has given it the edge over neighbouring markets. “If you look at the City core, it has definitely struggled a lot more, because many of the office spaces there aren’t inspiring, they’re not ‘wow’, they’re not necessarily a place where employees are rushing to go to,” he says. To what extent the rest of the UK will buy into Belcor’s methods remains to be seen, but it could just be that the nation’s office workers are in for a treat.  City fringe at a glance Average achieved office rent: £45.64 per sq ft Average office yield: 4.43% Investment total: £1.7bn Number of investment deals: 31 A total of 77 applications for 3.8m sq ft of new office space were submitted in 2021, with permission granted for 62 schemes delivering 2.8m sq ft of space. A total of 2.2m sq ft of space is currently under construction. Refurbishments make up the lion’s share of new development in the City fringe, representing 55% of all development projects. All figures have been sourced from EG Radius and are for the period 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2021, unless stated otherwise To send feedback, e-mail jim.larkin@eg.co.uk Click here to view agent activity by region, county, city and sector using our On-Demand Rankings >> Photo © Edward Webb/Shutterstock