The new Square Mile
In King's Cross, tech finds its centre of gravity.
And so, the time has come. Overcoming delays, design changes, and families of foxes, Google finally opened its new UK headquarters this week. Employees shared their first glimpses of the landscraper online.
It’s funny to think that plans for the site date back to when it was acquired in 2013, a year before Google acquired DeepMind. These days, the AI lab is so central to the tech company’s strategy that the building has been named in honour of one of its notable achievements. The building is named Platform 37, a reference to the 37th move with which AlphaGo defeated champion Go player Leed Sedol in 2016.
DeepMind’s influence goes well beyond a single building. As Tim Bradshaw wrote in the Financial Times this week, many credit Demis Hassabis’s resistance to moving the company stateside as the reason London now has such a thriving AI scene – and as a big factor in the King’s Cross revival.
That Google had already committed to the site before it bought DeepMind puts a slight wrinkle in this narrative. Indeed, the development of King’s Cross had been initiated in the noughties, and it was the completion of HS1 that arguably had the biggest impact on the area.
What we can say is that, for the AI era, Google DeepMind has become the centre of gravity. It pulls other companies and hopeful founders closer to a redeveloped King’s Cross that has been in the making for 20 years.
When I visited the Ethos AI offices last month (my full interview with co-founder James Lo should be up next week), I found a small team eating lunch together in a bright corner office with large windows. On one side they could see the station, and Platform 37 beyond it. On the other, they had a view of the converted Victorian warehouses into which OpenAI is due to move next year.
“All the talent is here – DeepMind, Meta, everybody’s here,” Lo said when I asked him why they’d chosen the location. “All the startups are here.” Lo’s co-founder, Daniel J. Mankowitz, was previously a research scientist at DeepMind and so could be called part of the DeepMind Diaspora1.
And the area is ready for them. As the number of startups looking for proximity has increased, so the office market has evolved to meet their needs.
A few weeks ago, I spent a few hours checking out offices around the area with Anna Mears and Gareth Smith from Rubberdesk, an online marketplace and broker platform for flexible office spaces.
Smith, who has been in the industry since 2010, told me there are now far more serviced operators now than there were a decade ago. Also known as “turnkey”, these are the kinds of offices where amenities like kitchens, cleaning, and Wi-Fi are all included. They often make the most sense for startups because it’s easy to hop from hotdesking to private office to an entire floor.
We began over at Halkin, a premium flexible workspace at the Mainframe, a former railway company headquarters that faces Euston station.
I get a bit of flack whenever I use the term “the Knowledge Quarter”, but I like it. True, it does have an engineered ring to it. The name officially refers to the consortium of organisations, including the Francis Crick Institute, UAL, Google, and several others, that have clubbed together to promote the area.
The reason I use it is simply that it better encompasses the sense of this place as an entire quarter, not a single station and its surroundings. To the west, Synthesia’s offices are almost at Regent’s Park. To the north, you’ll find the autonomous cars of Wayve Technologies parked up in their vast warehouse headquarters, far down the York Road.
Halkin at the Mainframe is a good example of the tech offices creeping further out from the epicentre of Granary Square, Coal Drops Yard, and the surrounding offices. That spread now goes in both directions, Smith said.
“Shoreditch is now almost the overflow for King’s Cross, whereas King’s Cross used to be an overflow for Shoreditch. It’s really flipped on its head.”
Inside the building, there are plush sofas, a parquet floor, low coffee tables with miniature sculptures. We’re not in WeWork any more.
Mears told me that there’s something of a “race to premium” going on in the City of London and you can see it around King’s Cross too. In offices, much like gyms, there always seems to be room to go more and more upscale.
There’s demand for mid-market spaces too, Mears and Smith told me, but there’s very little interest in bargain basement offices any more. “People would rather work from home than go into somewhere that has no facilities, that has no gym or bike racks or showers,” Smith said.
Next we walked over to the Lighthouse Building. You’ll know the one. As soon as you come out of King’s Cross station, you can see the triangular building jutting into traffic like the prow of a ship, a grey lighthouse on its roof.
The building dates back to 1875, and though it’s modernised inside, you can still see the quirks of the old structure. The tower under the lighthouse gives some occupants quirky little turret-like meeting rooms. One office, currently empty, has no windows onto the street, only skylights.
It illustrates the reality of the rush for space in this area. Though there has been a tremendous amount of development, not everything can be newbuild. But the converted storehouses and oyster bars and stables are part of what people like about the quarter.
Something else that’s changed in the last few years: events spaces. In part because more teams are hybrid, but also because of the buzzy calendar of tech events going on in the capital, many startups are now looking for an office where they’re able to host get-togethers. And there’s something of a status element too.
“For a lot of startups, that prestige of having an N1 postcode carries a lot of kudos,” said Smith.
Of course, London is a well-connected place. The Elizabeth Line, Smith and Mears told me, has completely changed the game. Your base can be almost anywhere – even Canary Wharf – and you can be in another part of the metropolis in half an hour.
But there’s still an irresistible pull to being in the place where you feel like everything is happening. And for this era, that place is undoubtedly King’s Cross.
Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.
🇪🇺 It looks less likely now that the EU’s Scaleup Europe fund will be able to invest in British companies. Mike Butcher has a good overview on Pathfounders and Dom Hallas of the StartUp Coalition explained some of the background from the UK side here. On one hand, of course it makes sense for EU countries to be worried about cash being poured into a non-EU state. On the other, that means the rest of Europe will miss out on its biggest AI hub – including many companies founded by EU citizens.
💭 Speaking of DeepMind, this longread profile of the company’s in-house philosopher Iason Gabriel by Robert P. Baird in the Guardian is worth a read.
💾 Lots of chat about Burnham’s potential about-face on AI strategy this week. I’ll be on the Pathfounders podcast shortly to discuss.
❗ Marked as Urgent, a series of discussions about online governance, is back with a session about the UK’s under-16s social media ban. It’s not until the 17th of September though, so there’s still time for a policy U-turn!
🤳🏼 Political fancam creator extraordinaire Ellen Stewart wrote about how the next general election will be won on vibes for Labourlist.
This is Matt Clifford’s coinage and I think it’s much better than DeepMind Mafia. Though I maintain that Matthew Stafford’s “Hassababies” would be the funniest option.