Google’s new London office is scheduled to open in 2016 and it will all swag. It will have an open air swimming pool, indoor football pitch, climbing wall and a roof garden.
The 1-million-sqare-foot office will sit on 2.4 acres of land between Kings Cross and St. Pancras stations. The deal was one of the
biggest commercial property acquisitions in Britain. Reuters
reports Google will spend £650 million ($1.05 billion) to buy and develop the site, with an eventual worth of £1 billion.
Interior offices. INK/Allford Hall Monaghan MorrisGoogle is spending so much money on this because it needs to do something with all those billions of dollars it has earned outside the U.S. because it can’t bring them home without a whopper of a tax bill.
Googlers can cycle right into the building to the 20,000-square-foot bike shed. INK/Allford Hall Monaghan Morris“The idea is that the people who are in the building — not the tenant but the actual staff — need to be attracted to the building. They need to like the community of the building,” says Simon Allford of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, the London architects building Google’s HQ.
Parts of the office, such as the promenade running through the building, will be open to the public. INK/Allford Hall Monaghan Morris