With workplace leasing enjoying a major post-pandemic bounceback, it’s clear that, once again, the office is seen as critical to success, writes Philip Hobley

The third quarter of 2025 marked the low point for sentiment among UK business leaders. Volatile geopolitics and concerns about UK productivity and competitiveness prompted executives to adopt defensive positions: cost reduction and cash control were the top priorities for chief finance officers surveyed by Deloitte in September.

Read the data from the London office market, however, and a different story emerges. Last year, London office take-up hit 12.1m square feet (sq ft) across 1,400 deals – the strongest year since the pandemic and right at the top end of our most optimistic forecast. Of the 98 deals signed in central London that were larger than 20,000 sq ft, 70 were expansionary, with companies agreeing to occupy more office space than they had before.

How can it be that the business community was both deeply anxious about the future and, at the same time, competing for larger slices of London’s prime office market? The explanation lies in a convergence of factors: the rapid pace of technological change, a long-postponed need to modernise facilities – a priority made even more urgent by the growing obsolescence of much of London’s existing office stock – intensifying competition for talent and classic supply-and-demand forces. Yet all these........

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