London office space: Canary Wharf makes a comeback

Working from home will not mean the end of the office. Landlords of high-quality London office space will do fine, says Max King

People at Canary Wharf
Canary Wharf is a leisure destination for local residents
(Image credit: © Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

It has become conventional wisdom that the pandemic is bad news for the commercial property sector. The shift to working from home will be partly permanent with people spending only two, three or four days a week in the office. Offices will need to be reconfigured to allow for desk-sharing, an increased number of meeting rooms and improved amenities to make working there more attractive, but overall demand will still be lower.

The principal victim of the downsizing of space requirements will be the owners of large office spaces into which nobody will be downsizing. The most obvious of these is Canary Wharf, a development based on office spaces of half a million to one million square feet. Perhaps Canary Wharf could even become a white elephant as competition from other modern developments siphons away demand and empty offices put off new tenants.

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Max King
Investment Writer

Max has an Economics degree from the University of Cambridge and is a chartered accountant. He worked at Investec Asset Management for 12 years, managing multi-asset funds investing in internally and externally managed funds, including investment trusts. This included a fund of investment trusts which grew to £120m+. Max has managed ten investment trusts (winning many awards) and sat on the boards of three trusts – two directorships are still active.

After 39 years in financial services, including 30 as a professional fund manager, Max took semi-retirement in 2017. Max has been a MoneyWeek columnist since 2016 writing about investment funds and more generally on markets online, plus occasional opinion pieces. He also writes for the Investment Trust Handbook each year and has contributed to The Daily Telegraph and other publications. See here for details of current investments held by Max.