Offices9 Too Few Tenants

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30499, 22 July 1964, Page 17

Offices 9 Too Few Tenants

(Special Crspdt. N Z PA.) LONDON, July 21. Eight million square feet of building in Britain stand idle and empty—there are too many offices and too few homes. This is stated by the “Daily Herald.” discussing what it calls “the white elephants of Britain’s free-for-all building boom.” It calls them “200-odd office blocks that have never heard

the clack of a typewriter or the click of a typist’s stiletto heels.” For months, it says, in some cases two years, buildings have been empty, waiting for tenants. “The empty, eight million square feet of office space is the equivalent of 10,000 average three-bedroom semidetached houses. This Is at a time when Britain has 600.000 homeless families, and at a time when many in the building industry doubt if their resources can cope with the Government’s new housing target of 400.000 a year.” The "Herald” suggests that

London’s large quota of untenanted offices is hardly surprising when the rents are considered: between £3 and £4 a year a square foot In the City of London developers are asking £5 a square foot for ground floors. The newspaper says that there has been a certain amount of overbuilding. In Birmingham, where rents are only 13s to £1 a square foot, there are 10 unlet blocks: Manchester has about five empty, Glasgow has a number lying idle. “Today the square mile of the City of London alone has .

eight new buildings lying empty. Many more are halfempty, and a score of new blocks are being built, with many more to come.”

The paper says that by the end of this year Middlesex will have three million square feet of unlet new office space—or enough to house half of Manchester's present requirements. The county planning officer estimates that if tenants continue to move in at the present rate it will be 11 years before they fill the offices for which planning permission has already been given.