Property analyst King Sturge reports that close to a quarter of all the rental deals agreed on West End office space last year involved businesses from these sectors.
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The financial services sector has a strong presence in various parts of London, but bankers and the like accounted for only 14 per cent of all newly agreed office deals in the West End during 2010.
Some of the most high-profile technology-based businesses in the world, including Facebook and Twitter, are widely expected to take up offices in central London at some point in the near future, but for now, the West End is attracting plenty of attention among firms from the same sector.
Despite being one of the most expensive places in the world to rent office space, commercial properties in London’s West End are still considered by many growing businesses with operations in the UK to offer good value for money.
King Sturge’s head of West End office research, Catherine Jones, commented: “Technology, media and telecoms is one of the few business sectors to have seen genuine expansion, and demand is such that occupiers are looking beyond the traditional boundaries of Soho into the wider West End market.
“This is also being driven by the availability of large, newly developed grade A space offering more attractive rental terms than the prime rents seen in the core of the West End.”
Elsewhere in London, the media giant Bloomberg is planning to establish a new European headquarters at a purpose-built office block in the City of London.
Editor’s notes: In 2022, there was 4.1 million square feet of office space taken up through lettings deals in the West End of London.
In 2022, the most active sector in the West End was Banking & Finance, accounting for 44.3 per cent of take-up, followed by Manufacturing at 15.6 per cent and, closely behind, TMT at 15.5 per cent.
In May 2023, it was expected that activity in the TMT sector would slow down due to the continued rollout of layoffs across the sector since the Summer of 2022.
Research conducted in June 2026 found that Cushman & Wakefield had reported that 2025’s total annual take-up in the West End was 2.55 million square feet.
The Banking & Finance sector remained the dominant sector in 2025, accounting for 32.40 per cent of leasing activity.
Cushman & Wakefield separated the Media and Technology sectors in their study and found that they accounted for 9 per cent and 4 per cent, respectively.
However, across London, the TMT sector was becoming more significant again due to the explosive growth of the AI ‘sector’.
It was reported that AI and technology firms accounted for more than a quarter of total central London office lettings take-up in Q1 2026.
The technology sector had accounted for nearly 30 per cent of Central London office take-up in the first quarter, with the brace of AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI renting almost 250,000 square feet alone.