British actor Bob Hoskins might have said it best decades ago as he climbed out of an abandoned warehouse and surveyed a scene that included scruffy parking lots, crumbling buildings and derelict land: “They’re calling it the most important regeneration project since the Great Fire.” Famous for his roles in The Long Good Friday, Hook and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Hoskins was talking about a then-deteriorating stretch of land on the River Thames between London Bridge and Tower Bridge. The BBC archival footage from a prescient interview 42 years ago depicts him analysing and lamenting changes being made to London’s South Bank, an area that for 200 years housed the docks where goods shipped back from the British Empire were once unloaded. Hoskins mentions that a 22-acre parcel in the area was recently bought by “Kuwaiti investors” who planned to build 2M SF of offices. That investor was St. Martins Property, part of the Gulf state’s sovereign wealth fund, and that office scheme eventually became the More London Place, home to London City Hall and global corporations like PwC and EY. Now the property needs to undergo its own huge regeneration. 
The changes coming to More London are less dramatic than those wrought by the end of an empire and the invention of the shipping container, which altered the way goods moved around the world.But for St. Martins, the shift in how companies are using office space and the need to decarbonise… Read the full story here. | 
