Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
After a period of muted activity following the pandemic and the 2022–23 macro wobble, leasing volumes in Central London picked up sharply through 2024 and into 2025. Take‑up in 2024 reached around 9.7 million sq. ft., with a strong Q4 contributing to rising momentum and a notable improvement on the previous year.
This rebound reflects both delayed decision‑making finally converting to deals, and a clearer consensus among corporates that hybrid working still requires a meaningful, high‑quality London footprint.
London’s status as the world’s second‑largest financial center continues to underpin this recovery, with global capital markets, insurance, and asset management groups maintaining large, client‑facing teams in the City and West End.
For coworking and flex providers, this cyclical upswing in core tenant demand has two effects: it pulls prime buildings further out of reach on rent, but it also creates a deeper pool of corporates willing to use flex for swing space, project teams and regional or innovation satellites.
Specialized Space Demand
The most striking feature of the current cycle is the uncompromising preference for Grade A, ESG‑led space. In 2024, Grade A accounted for roughly two‑thirds of all leasing in Central London, illustrating how far the market has polarized between best‑in‑class and the rest.
Landlords with highly sustainable, BREEAM‑rated, EPC‑strong buildings have benefited from rental growth and high occupancy, while Grade B space has seen weaker demand and even forecast rental decline.
Financial services tenants have been at the forefront of this shift, frequently opting for the newest schemes and deep refurbishments that can evidence strong ESG credentials and wellness‑oriented design.
Recent deals have included major banks and insurers committing to prime towers and campus‑style developments in the City core and Canary Wharf, often combining traditional floors with managed and flex space components to provide internal agility.
For coworking operators, the implication is clear: buildings that can support premium membership pricing and enterprise suites are those that match institutional ESG expectations, while secondary Grade B blocks are increasingly difficult to reposition without heavy capex.
Who Is Taking Up Space
Perhaps more surprising has been the strength of demand from the technology, media and telecoms (TMT) sectors through 2024 and into 2025. In several quarters, TMT requirements have matched or exceeded financial services in active demand, with some data placing tech and media at close to 30% of total London office requirements. This marks a reversal from the post‑2022 tech correction, when cost‑cutting and sub‑leasing dampened the sector’s appetite for new space.
Media, content and gaming firms have been particularly active in the West End and fringe submarkets, often looking for highly amenitized, characterful space that can still boast strong sustainability ratings and good transport links.
Examples include creative agencies and streaming‑related businesses expanding in Soho and Fitzrovia, as well as larger digital platforms re‑configuring their London hubs with a mix of leased floors and flexible, managed project space.
For operators of coworking space, this TMT recovery has translated into robust demand for studios, production‑friendly layouts, and branded “neighborhoods” within flex centers, sometimes outpacing interest from the more conservative financial occupiers during parts of 2025.
Flexible Workspace Industry Trends
While end‑user demand for flexible workspace has remained healthy, the behavior of coworking and serviced office operators in the leasing market has shifted markedly compared with the pre‑pandemic expansion phase.
Research on the London flex market in 2024 highlights an interesting divergence: overall headline demand from occupiers dipped by around 10% year‑on‑year, but transaction volumes rose by about 35%, driven by larger, more committed deals. Occupancy in London coworking stayed high — in the mid‑80% range — and average desk prices in the capital held broadly stable, reinforcing the message that the underlying product remains attractive.
However, many of those transactions have involved landlords and operators re‑gearing existing centers, joint‑ventures or management agreements rather than operators taking large new leases on speculative basis.
The era when big brands such as WeWork routinely signed entire buildings on long institutional leases has clearly passed; WeWork’s expansion in Victoria in early 2023 now looks like the tail‑end of that strategy, with subsequent corporate restructuring curbing its appetite for new commitments.
At the same time, large institutional owners — REITs and estates — have accelerated conversion of their own space into landlord‑branded “flex floors” or operating partnerships, meaning some demand that once would have been expressed as third‑party coworking take‑up now sits within the landlord’s own flex platform.
For the coworking market, this is a move from land‑grab to optimization. Operators are prioritizing profitable centers, longer average contract lengths (which have risen notably since 2023), and a focus on larger corporate customers rather than chasing every available floor plate. The result is that new space taken by coworking brands in 2024/25 appears lower than in the mid‑2010s, even as occupancy and revenue quality within existing portfolios have improved.
One important explanation for the recent slowdown in operator leasing is that many of the savvier flex providers had already locked in favorable deals during the more distressed phase of the cycle in 2022–23. Central London saw elevated vacancy and softer headline rents during this period as traditional occupiers downsized or delayed decisions, giving flexible workspace brands an opportunity to secure buildings and floors at discounted terms and with generous incentive packages.
Several operators expanded their footprint significantly between 2021 and late 2023, with hundreds of new centers opening across Central London alone, much of it on economics that would be difficult to replicate today.
As market conditions have tightened and demand for Grade A sustainable space has intensified, rental expectations in prime locations have risen, and incentives have started to normalize.
Against that backdrop, operators that had already stocked up on high‑quality, well‑located space during the “cheap money, high vacancy” window are understandably cautious about additional commitments. Instead, they are concentrating on driving occupancy, pushing up effective desk rates where the market will bear it, and layering in value‑added services such as managed suites, event programming and hybrid solutions for enterprise clients.
From a coworking point of view, then, the London office story in 2024–25 is not one of structural decline but of maturation. Finance and, increasingly, tech and media are competing for best‑in‑class buildings, reinforcing London’s position as a global financial and creative hub and leaving secondary Grade B stock exposed.
Flex operators, meanwhile, are behaving less like speculative space aggregators and more like disciplined operators of a stabilized, service‑driven product — supported in no small part by the “canny” decision to secure much of the space they needed at lower rents in 2022–23.
