Amazon buys further into London with major office plan

E-retail giant Amazon has delivered a major boost to London with the announcement it is to take 40,000 m2 of office space in a new development in the Shoreditch district.

Brookfield Property Partners is the developer responsible for the new 15-storey office building named Principal Place.

The addition of a new corporate office at Principal Place to current offices, through a new lease agreement, will provide Amazon with total capacity for over 5,000 London employees by 2017. The e-commerce retail giant currently employs around 1,700 employees in its UK offices.

'We have already invested well over £1 bn (€1.3 bn) and created more than 7,000 permanent jobs across the UK,' said Christopher North, managing director of Amazon.co.uk. 'To support our continued growth in the UK, we have secured this exceptional building, giving us the capacity to hire thousands of new employees in London in the coming years, in addition to the thousands of permanent roles we will create across our UK fulfilment and customer service centres.'

Amazon has also announced that all corporate employees will be located in London by the summer of 2015 across three offices within the capital.

Amazon currently has two corporate offices in London - 60 Holborn Viaduct which opened last year - and the Amazon Development Centre which opened on Glasshouse Yard, near the Barbican, in 2012. To provide additional capacity for growth in London in the lead-up to the opening of Principal Place in 2017, Amazon will also take temporary occupancy of 1 Leadenhall Court in April 2015.

Located on Norton Folgate, between Liverpool Street and Shoreditch High Street stations, Principal Place is a mixed-use development with a 56,000 m2, 15-storey office building and an adjacent residential tower. The development is due for completion in 2016.