The plan for the office space site, near Old Street in East London, is to serve as a creative hub for fledgling companies to develop and commercialise their ideas. Google signed a ten-year lease on the space.
Old Street is close to an area of the city dubbed ‘Silicon Roundabout’ where progress is being made towards establishing a large-scale global technology hub that could eventually rival the famously innovative Silicon Valley area of California.
Read the profiles of the Providers of Flex Space at Silicon Roundabout
Google itself emerged from Mountain View in Silicon Valley, and the company clearly sees strong potential for London office space to host major technology startups in the years ahead.
“East London is already home to hundreds of innovative British startups, and has huge potential for economic growth and new jobs over the coming years,” said David Singleton, an engineering director at Google UK.
The British government is keen to see initiatives like this, led by Google, progress and expand in London, particularly in the four-mile ‘Tech City’ zone earmarked specifically with this aim in mind.
Chancellor George Osborne welcomed the news of Google’s latest commitment to the capital as “great news”.
“It shows that we can create the right environment to attract start-ups and established high-technology businesses, supporting our programme to create new jobs, diversify the economy and create long-term economic growth,” he said.
Startup office space in East London has helped encourage the development of ideas like the micro-blogging service Tweetdeck and the online loan provider Wonga.com. Meanwhile, office space in the nearby City of London is home to some of the world’s biggest banking groups and investment businesses.
Editor’s notes: Google’s seven-story building known as Campus London opened in March 2012 on Bonhill Street.
During the pandemic lockdowns, Google decided not to reopen Campus London afterwards.
The company said founders no longer need to rely on one physical space, as “today’s founders in London are part of a vibrant ecosystem of 250+ coworking spaces”.
Read the profiles of Coworking space providers in London
Google advised that it would continue to provide start-up support through various virtual and other physical programmes.
As of July 2023, Google’s new London HQ is well underway – the £1 billion, 1 million square feet office development in King’s Cross is due to open in 2024.
On Septmber 17th, 2026, it was announced that Google DeepMind offshoot, Emulate, had neared a $4 billion valuation just a month after founding as it closed in on a $700 million Seed round.
Emulate was the third UK neo-lab to emerge from Google DeepMind’s London offices this year, with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
Founded in the UK in 2010, the company was acquired by Google in 2014 and merged with Google AI’s Google Brain division to become Google DeepMind in April 2023.
Emulate on so-called world models, AI systems designed to simulate and predict how physical environments behave.
Unlike the large language models underpinning products such as ChatGPT and Gemini, which predict and generate language, world models aim to understand how actions affect an environment.
That could allow a robotics company to test thousands of movements in simulated warehouses before putting a robot to work in the real world.