Currently based in Soho, the London staff of Facebook will move to Covent Garden, where the company has leased 36,000 square feet of office space.
There are currently 70 Facebook employees in the London office, though the company is actively recruiting.
Many had thought Facebook would elect Silicon Roundabout in Shoreditch as the site of its new London headquarters, but the company decided not to join the many technology outfits which have recently moved to the area.
Read profiles of providers of Flex Space at Silicon Roundabout
Joanna Shields, the company’s Vice-President and Managing Director of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told the Telegraph: “As Facebook’s growth continues, we are delighted to be expanding our operations in the UK with a move to a larger office in central London next year.
“With over 30 million people using Facebook every month in the UK, and over 750 million globally, we’re excited about the next phase in our development.”
Facebook’s UK office is primarily responsible for sales, while all of the engineering and development of the service is still based in the US, particularly at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
Earlier this year Facebook announced that it is to move to a much larger campus in nearby Menlo Park. Employees will start being moved over to the new campus later this summer, the company said.
Facebook’s new headquarters in Menlo Park are in the Sun Microsystems campus. Mark Zuckerberg’s company signed a 15-year lease on the new office space, with an option to buy after five years.
The new facilities are a nine-building campus located at Bayfront Expressway and Willow Road. Facebook has also purchased 22 acres across Bayfront Expressway for future use.
Editor’s notes: Facebook signed a lease that would commence in April 2017 for 242,800 square feet of office space at One Rathbone Square, just off Oxford Street. It was a 15-year lease with no breaks at an initial annual rent of £17.8 million.
On completion of that lease, the owners of the building, GPE, sold the building to German investors for £435 million.
As of July 2023, Facebook had committed to several hundred thousand square feet at various buildings at the Spring District development in the Seattle area, that were due to complete later that year.
In January 2024, it was announced that Facebook and its parent company Meta would close its One Rathbone Square London headquarters.
The company planned to consolidate its teams at Rathbone Square into its recently opened King’s Cross campus and newly expanded Brock Street office.
At the time, there were no released details on the mechanism with which the tenant terminated the lease nor whether it had to pay compensation to the landlord Deka Immobilien.
We reported in September 2023 that Meta had paid £149 million in compensation to the landlords of Regent’s Place, British Land, for the early surrender of its lease there.