Western Corridor takes centre stage in BCO NextGen’s latest market update

The Western Corridor stepped firmly into the spotlight at our BCO NextGen London & South East Q3 Market Update webinar on 19 November.

Guided by expert insight from JLL’s Vicky Heath and Barrie David, the session, hosted by NextGen London & South East Chair Ella Griffin, offered a welcome dose of clarity about a market in motion: reshaping, recalibrating and, in many places, reinventing itself.

And if one message came through loud and clear, it was this: the Western Corridor is changing fast, and the industry must change with it.

“It’s likely the South East will need less overall space, but more space of a better quality.”
Barrie David, JLL

A market rebalancing, not retreating

Too often the narrative around offices in the post-pandemic world has focused on contraction. But the picture painted by JLL was far more nuanced and far more optimistic.

Take-up across the Western Corridor reached 1.6m sq ft in the first nine months of 2025, putting the market on track to beat its long-term average and even nudge ahead of the 2021 rebound. Reading remains the anchor, responsible for more than a third of all space let this year, while the Thames Valley continues to outperform West London in sheer volume.

But it’s who is taking space that is most interesting. The Western Corridor has always had a distinctive DNA, more tech, more manufacturing, more innovation and 2025 is no exception. TMT and manufacturing led the charge again this year, together accounting for nearly half of all take-up.

Future demand only sharpens this picture. TMT companies, particularly AI-led firms, now make up around 50% of all active enquiries.

People returning, portfolios stabilising

We cannot talk about offices without talking about people. JLL’s Future of Work research shows that the great post-Covid space reduction has slowed dramatically.

In 2023, more than half of companies expected to shrink their footprint. Today, that figure is 29%. Many organisations, it seems, over-corrected during the pandemic and are now readjusting to the realities of hybrid working.

And perhaps most encouragingly, UK workers are coming in to the office. For companies requiring three to four days a week in the office, 77% of employees comply, with another 5% working five days in the office. The office is re-establishing itself as a place of purpose, not presence.

“For the vast majority of employees, office work provides tangible benefits, the office is a mechanism for creating healthy boundaries.”
Vicky Heath, JLL

For our industry, this really matters. It sets the foundation for future demand and reinforces the responsibility we have to create workplaces worthy of people’s time.

Supply shortages and the pressures ahead

While demand stabilises, the supply story is becoming more complex. Just 100,000 sq ft of new and retrofit space will be completed this year, leading to a massive undersupply of that space, much is already pre-let, putting further pressure on availability.

By 2027, the Western Corridor faces a clear shortage of high-quality space, especially as older buildings continue to be lost to residential and, in some cases, logistics and data centre uses. This is a market where the “flight to quality” is no longer a trend, it is a structural reality.

The defining story of the next decade

The Western Corridor has lost around 6m sq ft of office space to alternative use since 2019, and this reshaping is far from finished.

While places such as Oxford, Cambridge and Reading, buoyed by science, technology and strong infrastructure, are forging ahead, attracting investment and commanding rents that support refurbishment and deep retrofits, other locations face tougher choices. Lower-rent markets such as Slough and Staines simply cannot sustain new development with today’s construction costs. Here, repurposing, whether to residential, industrial, or alternative employment uses, may offer the most viable path forward.

Upgrading, repurposing and re-imagining space will define the Western Corridor’s next decade.

But for all the challenges, the Western Corridor remains an extraordinary place of enterprise. It is home to the UK’s greatest concentration of office parks, to world-class global occupiers, and to towns and cities with powerful economic gravity. It is where technology, science, manufacturing and innovation rub shoulders and increasingly, where the future of work is being tested at scale.

But the message from this latest NextGen briefing was unmistakable: what succeeds in the Western Corridor now is high-quality space, amenity, and high-quality thinking. Whether city-centre or campus-style, new-build or retrofit, the best schemes are those centred on people and grounded in place.

The market may need less office space in time, but it will certainly need better space. And that is where the opportunity lies for our industry: to raise our ambitions, to bring imagination to ageing assets, and to build places where businesses and people can thrive.

Watch the webinar on the BCO NextGen YouTube channel