IN FOCUS | Bruntwood SciTech’s West Village

On completion of its £20m redevelopment this autumn, the 230,000 sq ft workspace in Leeds’ West End was 75% let, with some notable deals secured. Place Yorkshire spoke to Bruntwood SciTech’s Andrew Cooke for the full story.

First came Brexit: companies were doomed; the only way was down. Then Covid arrived and with it, the advent of working from home. The office was over. But, like a phoenix from the ashes, the office returned – and it was shinier, brighter, and healthier.

Grade A offices are a value-added asset that well-heeled employees expect and employers can take pride in. Whether or not there is any fallout from October’s Budget, set to add a further tax burden to employers, remains to be seen – but what is clear, is that office space that can adapt to its times and live up to what occupiers want, can seemingly survive most predicted market setbacks.

Amongst this, comes the recently launched West Village from Bruntwood SciTech.

Andrew Cooke, centre, speaking at a Place event. Credit: Place North

Place Yorkshire spoke to Andrew Cooke, regional director – Leeds, about challenges and trends in the office space environment, and the company’s nose for predicting what working spaces we need next.

West Village is the outcome of a £20m investment by Bruntwood SciTech – a joint venture between Bruntwood, Legal & General, and Greater Manchester Pension Fund – nothing less than a full redevelopment of the firm’s West One and Castle House holdings.

West Village is now a 230,000 sq ft workspace with a variety of products within its walls: meeting rooms, coworking desks, serviced offices, and traditional leased floorplates are all available.

“The key thing is flexibility, and allowing customers to grow,” notes Cooke. “So, the first point of contact might be a coworking space or a meeting room, but then we can move them into other spaces… We’ve done a complete intervention in the building and tried to rethink how customers use and operate within a workspace.”

Choosing Leeds

The grade A office market is booming in Leeds, with developments such as Bruntwood SciTech’s Platform, and Wellington Place filling buildings, encouraging speculative development in projects such as Vastint UK’s Aire Park.

Rents have reached a high of £39 per sq ft, with the market showing no signs of slowing down.

Cooke says: “We created the blueprint for this building several years ago, focused around customers wanting more from their space, needing more flexibility, wanting more amenity and services – more than just a conventional desk that you would have had, say, a decade ago.

“Looking at this building, we saw the potential for West Village. We’ve designed and delivered buildings with a similar model in Manchester and Liverpool. We’re underway with  similar refurbs in Birmingham, and Leeds offered the perfect opportunity.

“As a city, Leeds is a thriving tech and digital economy. It’s one of the cities where you have ‘brain gain’, whereby more students stay than leave. There’s a strong fintech industry here, and very aligned city leaders. So with all those different dynamics, Leeds felt like a good opportunity and definitely somewhere we’d like to see more plans in the future.”

Predicting the future

The building itself has, amongst other things, a new steel frame, glazing, three levels of amenity space, ‘arrival experience’ space, customer suites, terraces, and a courtyard. It’s beautiful inside and out, and links into the wellness trend – if you can still call it a trend.

Cooke says: “It’s well known that if you’re healthy and happy you’re more productive and you have fewer absences. Businesses want their colleagues to be healthy and happy, so we’re putting in gym spaces – in this case, we’ve used our partner FORM. The concept here is a yoga, pilates, and barre studio.”

The West Village project team included Cubic Works and 3D Reid. Credit: via Citypress

Was Bruntwood SciTech concerned about its investment in West Village, so soon after Covid and the change in working patterns that spawned?

“With Covid itself, certainly there was a short, sharp shock of ‘are customers going to come back?’ It was a serious question for a brief moment, but what we found was, because we’d already started repositioning our buildings, we were already ahead. We found the bounce-back to customers using the space was actually much more rapid than other pockets of the market.”

Bruntwood SciTech managed to be ahead of the curve in office trends, in terms of both the desire for grade A flexible coworking space and another hot post-Covid topic: life sciences. With parks already established in Cheshire and Cambridge, when the pandemic hit the company was well positioned to assist.

“During Covid there was a drastic need to mobilise testing facilities or lab space uses, and the likes of Alderley Park were ready. We were able to easily put people into those spaces, who were doing incredible things in that area.”

Seeing as the company has a knack for predicting workspace trends, does Cooke have any thoughts on potential future ways of working?

“It’s interesting, the life science and workspace element is actually closer than you think. Yes, from the face of it, the two operating areas are quite different, insofar as one might be working at a bench. But there’s a blurring line of the convergence of workspace, digital and technology, coming together with life sciences.

“There’s an intersection. There’s a theory that there will be less need for some elements of life science use at a bench, and it will be done through AI and other high technology-based means.

“It’s not something we’ve seen happening specifically at the moment, but there’s definitely a convergence there, where they blend together.

“Often what you find with our customer base is, you’ll have a life science business that needs an eco-system of other businesses that will support them. They need access to amazing lawyers and recruitment businesses, and they need that close to them. With Bruntwood SciTech we have 1,100 businesses across the portfolio and we can link them all in together. That’s one of the key things; creating an ecosystem within the building but also on a national level as well.”

West Village now offers an ESG-led environment. Credit: via Citypress

Even a business as experienced as Bruntwood SciTech continues to evolve and to learn from each new development and repositioning, as Cooke explains:

“With every building that we create, we learn from it. We see how our customers use it and we engage with our customers, whether that be through the app we have in the building or with data around how they’re booking meeting rooms. We understand what they’re doing within the building and we use that to form the next iteration.

“Evolved property providers need to think about how they’re not only going to give the space a customer needs, not just access to wellness spaces and coffee shops, but also giving the business access to the means they need to grow, thrive, and be economically successful.”