Google announced that it plans to spend billions in its UK offices a few years ago, and the company is now delivering on its promises. Google announced that it’s purchasing the Central Saint Giles site, which is already the home of Google, for $1 billion. The company also announced plans to employ thousands of more employees, and it shared some plans on how it intends to renovate the new offices to make them more suitable for hybrid working.
Google currently has 6,400 employees, and the company recruited 700 new people last year alone. The new office will have the capacity for up to 10,000 employees, and have a total of 408,000 square feet of office space, 25,000 square feet dedicated for restaurants and cafes.
Google will also make additional renovations to the Central Saint Giles offices that will “ensure that they are the best equipped to meet the needs of our future workplace.”
“We believe that the future of work is flexibility. Whilst the majority of our UK employees want to be on-site some of the time, they also want the flexibility of working from home a couple of days a week. Some of our people will want to be fully remote. Our future UK workplace has room for all of those possibilities.
Over the next few years, we’ll be embarking on a multi-million pound refurbishment of our offices within Central Saint Giles to ensure that they are best equipped to meet the needs of our future workplace.
We'll be introducing new types of collaboration spaces for in-person teamwork, as well as creating more overall space to improve wellbeing. We’ll introduce team pods, which are flexible new space types that can be reconfigured in multiple ways, supporting focused work, collaboration or both, based on team needs. The new refurbishment will also feature outdoor covered working spaces to enable work in the fresh air.”