Victoria set for £4bn investment as Armani and Jimmy Choo relocate
Victoria is set for a £4bn investment over the next decade as developers cash in on companies following in Armani and Jimmy Choo's footsteps and relocating their headquarters to the area.
London’s busy transport hub has undergone a major shift over the last ten years as government departments who were traditionally the biggest office-users in Victoria moved out and arts, media and technology firms taking advantage of the lower rents move in.
According to a report out today by the Victoria Business Improvement District (BID) over £4bn investment will be ploughed into the district over the next decade, creating three million square feet of new office and retail space.
The lion’s share of this (£3bn) will come from property giant Land Securities’ which is developing 10 schemes and aims to deliver 600 apartments, 2m square feet of offices and 280,000 sq ft of retail by 2019.
Transport for London is ploughing around £700m into its refurbishment of the underground at Victoria while Network Rail has committed around £15m towards giving the tired Victoria Place shopping centre a facelift, and will be revamping Victoria Station at some point in the near future.
Ruth Duston, head of Victoria BID, told City A.M.: “Victoria is undergoing massive change and has got an unbelievable programme of infrastructure projects happening. A lot of this has been fragmented up until today and what we wanted to do by publishing this report was bring all that information together under one vision for the area.”
She added that historically Victoria has always been as a gateway for the 130m passengers that come through Victoria station every year, but that is starting to change, with the area turning into a destination in its own right.
“We have seen radical transformation in sector mix coming to work in Victoria and there is much more residential being made available and there is an appetite for people wanting to live in the area,” Duston added.
Victoria’s latest tenants: Georgio Armani, Tom Ford and Moet Hennessy, Jimmy Choo and Burberry, John Lewis
Major developers: Land Securities, Derwent London, Grosvenor, Network Rail
Average price of office space: £70 per square foott, compared with £120 per sq ft in nearby Mayfair and St James’s
Take-up of office space in Victoria rose 75 per cent in 2012 on the previous year.
Prices for prime residential space in Victoria start at £1,600 square feet and are set to rise to £2,000 per sq ft by 2016. That compares with prices in Knightsbridge and Belgravia, which start at around £5,000+ per sq ft.