Future Shoreditch Plan’s 200,000 Square Metres Will Decide What The Next Phase Looks Like
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat contribute reporting from somewhere between Old Street and Liverpool Street.
The Tech City cluster, the loose constellation of design, technology, and creative-industry businesses that grew up around Old Street roundabout in the early 2010s, is in 2026 a meaningfully different organism than the one that David Cameron’s government attempted, with mixed success, to brand as Britain’s answer to Silicon Valley. The branding mostly fell away. The cluster, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, did not.
What Survived
The original Tech City vision, with its cherished government photo opportunities and its periodic announcements of new venture capital funds, was always somewhat downstream of the actual organic clustering of small creative businesses that had been moving into Shoreditch and Hoxton since the late 1990s. The branding came and went. The clustering, anchored by relatively low rents (then), good transport links, and a critical mass of design-school graduates, persisted.
What is left, in 2026, is a serious creative-tech ecosystem that includes companies in advertising, design, AI, fintech, gaming, e-commerce, music technology, and a long tail of small studios and consultancies. According to Greater London Authority economic-cluster data, the Shoreditch and Hoxton creative-tech cluster supports tens of thousands of jobs and contributes significantly to the borough’s tax base.
What Has Changed
The change, between 2014 and 2026, is the cluster’s gravitational profile. The early phase was anchored by small companies, which is to say studios of 3-15 people that could afford small offices on the periphery of Shoreditch. The current phase has more medium-sized companies (50-300 employees) clustered around Old Street, with the smallest companies displaced eastward toward Hackney Wick and Walthamstow as rents have risen.
This has implications for the cluster’s long-term character. Creative-tech ecosystems thrive on a constant influx of small, founder-led firms. If the entry-level rent profile keeps small firms out of the area, the cluster matures into a corporate office park. The character of “Tech City” depended, fundamentally, on the small firms. Their absence over time will be felt.
The 2026 Office Question
The Future Shoreditch Plan’s projected 200,000 square metres of new office space is, in scale, going to roughly double the cluster’s commercial real estate footprint. The question is who occupies it. If the new offices are taken up by large corporates, fintech expansion arms, or US-based consultancies opening London bases, the cluster’s character continues to drift away from its origins. If a meaningful portion is allocated to genuinely affordable workspace for small creative firms, the original ecology can, in part, be preserved.
According to Hackney Council’s planning framework, the latter outcome is the stated goal. Whether it is achieved depends on enforcement, on the council’s willingness to push back on developer floor-plate logic, and on the broader London commercial-property market.
What I Will Be Watching
What I will be watching, over the next five years, is what proportion of the new office space ends up genuinely affordable to small studios. The benchmark is around 5,000 square metres at sub-market rents. If the plan delivers that, the cluster’s small-firm pipeline survives. If it delivers 1,000 square metres, the small firms continue their displacement east, and Shoreditch becomes, in 2030, a slightly more interesting version of Soho.
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