European real estate giant Hammerson wants to build a £350 million tower in London which will have 590,000 square feet of office space and 243 luxury flats. At 40,000 square feet, the office space will have some of the largest floors in London.
Dubbed Principal Place, the skyscraper will be designed by Foster and Partners. The commercial space is intended for use as a corporate headquarters office.
Martin Jepson, London Managing Director, said: “The evolution of the scheme means we can now offer a high-quality differentiated office product to City occupiers at a time when there is modest supply for this type of building.”
Previously, Hammerson had been planning a project called Bishops Place on the same site on Shoreditch High Street. However, the plans ran into determined local opposition.
Hackney is to make a decision on Principal Place by the arrival of summer, with a targeted completion date of 2014.
The project’s website claims, “Principal Place will create public open spaces alongside offices, shops and homes and bring with it new job opportunities. It will open up an area that is currently largely inaccessible to the public to deliver a vibrant place for people to live, work, and visit close to the heart of London.”
Hammerson is one of the largest Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in Europe. It switched to REIT status when the UK introduced REITs in 2007. Hammerson is on the FTSE 100 index, with most of its portfolio being in the UK. However, the company also has operations in France, Spain and Germany.
Editor’s notes: Hammerson had secured an anchor tenant for the office element of the scheme, the international law firm CMS, through a pre-leasing negotiation. However, when CMS pulled out in 2012, Hammerson sold its interest in the scheme to Brookfield Properties.
In 2014, it was reported that the new landlord was in negotiations with the e-commerce giant Amazon, which was looking to occupy a total of 630,000* square feet of office space and use it as its UK headquarters.
In 2018, Amazon moved into the building and, as of June 2023, remained the only tenant of the office element. The scheme also included 25,000 square feet of retail and leisure space, as well as a public piazza.
Principal Place is located in Shoreditch, on the edge of the City of London, close to Broadgate Tower. Whilst it offers large floor plates for larger occupiers, the location is synonymous with flexible office space solutions operated by over 30 flexible workspace providers, utilised by a wide variety of companies of all sizes.
See the profiles of the providers of Flexible Offices in Shoreditch here
In the residential element of Principal Place, as of June 2023, a 2-bedroom apartment on the 27th floor was being marketed for £1.4 million.
*The office element of the scheme grew from the initial plans with floor plates offering circa 45,000 square feet as opposed to circa 40,000 square feet.
As of July 2026, the entire office element of Principal Place was let to Amazon, which utilised it as its UK headquarters and nicknamed it ‘LHR16’, presumably so-named for London Heathrow’s official code combined with an internal tracking system.
Sitting on the edge of The City, the scheme’s tagline is ‘The Unsquare Mile’ and offers an array of retail and leisure options.