King’s Cross puts London on the AI map
A description of King’s Cross a little over 20 years ago sounds like something from a Dickens novel. It was “a place of decay, dereliction, crime and filth” – known for drugs and prostitution.
Some readers may remember its rave scene but for most people it was a no-go area.
That opening description comes from Roger Madelin, the former chief executive of Argent (now Related Argent), which drove through one of this country’s most ambitious and successful regeneration schemes. Madelin, speaking to The Times at the end of last year, said he was always confident that one day people would bring their children to King’s Cross on a Saturday afternoon.
He was right about that, but he surely couldn’t have predicted that it would also become a globally important hub for one of the world’s most groundbreaking and consequential sectors: artificial intelligence.
The tech sector has been drawn to King’s Cross in recent years, with Meta well established and Google finally starting to move people into its mega ‘landscraper’ in the coming weeks. But it’s the new kids on the block that are turbocharging the reputation of this part of London.
AI is powering demand for London offices
OpenAI and Anthropic – two of the world’s leading AI labs – have announced plans for new offices in the area, and they’ll rub shoulders with the likes of autonomous car company Wayve, the AI video firm Synthesia, Scale AI and of course DeepMind, an early tenant, now owned by Google. Now Jeff Bezos’s AI venture, Prometheus, is in talks to take nearly 40,000 square feet of King’s Cross office space.
If King’s Cross is becoming the capital’s AI citadel, start-ups are clustering in other parts of the city, too, from Southwark to Stratford. New research by CBRE shows AI firms are set to take up as much as 4m square feet of office space in London by 2033, up from 1.5m square feet today. AI-related tenants currently account for almost 12 per cent of landlord Great Portland Estate’s office portfolio and more than a quarter of its flexible work spaces.
Thanks to London, analysts now talk of the UK as the third most important centre for AI after the US and China.
Beyond the jobs and investment, the technology being developed and deployed here is potentially transformative and constitutes one of the most promising pro-growth bets the UK has made.