Welcome to the neighbourhood
As HSBC UK’s new headquarters building at Centenary Square on Broad Street comes on stream, it’s only fitting to welcome them to the city’s new commercial neighbourhood.
More than 2,000 HSBC employees will soon be permanently based on Broad Street as the bank’s entire retail and commercial head office decamps from its current Canary Wharf base.
Where the Colmore Business District once ended we will soon have a continual strip of high quality development stretching from Eastside up to Snow Hill and along Colmore Row, on to Broad Street and beyond.
On a site which at most once employed maybe 1,500 at the height of Central TV’s reign, Arena Central, like Paradise, has the potential to create a modern business environment where 10,000 people or more can work. HSBC will have 2,000 people in a single building. The new HMRC base under construction behind it will house more than 3,000.
At Paradise we already have PwC moving its existing 1,400 strong Birmingham team into One Chamberlain Square next year with the potential to add several hundred employees on top of that in the future. This not just creates a large and exciting new regional base for the firm, but it is also the biggest single investment PwC has ever made in the UK outside of London.
Our second building, Two Chamberlain Square, which is still under construction, has the potential to house even more people. And then our next building, One Centenary Way, will deliver another major 280,000 sq ft office destination across fourteen floors with enough space to accommodate up to 3,500.
These are big office spaces designed to match increasing demand from occupiers, especially those looking for the best possible space. Despite all the predictions over the past two decades that offices would go out of fashion, and with the advent of mobile technology everyone would be working from home, we are currently building more offices in this country than we have ever done before.
London currently has some 15 million sq ft of office space under construction – more than the entire Birmingham office market. The question to ask is, simply, why are we building so much new office space right now?
We live in a service-dominated economy and the professional part of the service sector needs office space. Demand stalled during the last recession so there is also an element of demand only now catching up.
It’s also always more efficient to create higher density working environments in city centres because it places people in locations they want to be with lots of amenities they need and will use on their doorstep. With the Metro extension opening next year, we will be plugged straight into the city’s growing public transport network, for example, while the restaurants, cafés and bars planned for Paradise will rely on people working there as well as those walking through.
We are finally seeing the fruit of many years hard work to bring new employment opportunities and economic growth to a very important part of the city centre.
And we’re proud to have neighbours, like HSBC, who are committed to the same thing.