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Lloyd’s of London has agreed with its landlord Ping An to stay at its One Lime Street headquarters until at least 2035, in a mark of commitment to in-person trading at the heart of the City’s insurance district.
The deal with Ping An, struck on Friday, gives Lloyd’s — an insurance marketplace where brokers come to find coverage for a variety of commercial risks from individual syndicates — the further option to remain in the Richard Rogers-designed building until 2040. The deal also includes an agreement to invest in reducing the Grade I-listed building’s energy footprint.
Lloyd’s chair Bruce Carnegie-Brown said the deal underlined the importance of face-to-face trading to the market, saying the underwriting room — a web of underwriters’ desks around the famous Lutine Bell where brokers come to hammer out policies — held “a special place in our market’s collective consciousness”.
The marketplace first took form in a seventeenth century London coffee shop but has called the distinctive building home since 1986.
Periods of remote working during coronavirus shutdowns, and the rise of digital trading, had led some to question whether Lloyd’s should move away from face-to-face dealings, and the One Lime Street offices, altogether. But senior executives backed retaining a physical presence and favoured staying in the building, the Financial Times reported last year.
The corporation that runs the market will be redesigning other spaces within the building to “support our market’s collaboration and innovation”, Carnegie-Brown said.
Lloyd’s said the agreement with Chinese insurance company Ping An, which has owned the building for a decade, will allow it to continue its renovation of workspaces and make further refurbishments, including improvements to energy efficiency. Currently, the building has an energy rating of E, in an official range where A+ is best and G is worst.
It did not disclose the terms of the deal. Ping An did not reply to an immediate request for comment.
Dubbed the “inside-out” building with services such as water pipes and lifts running down the outside, One Lime Street has been compared by some to an oil rig and a motorcycle engine.
Refurbishments earlier this year to the ground floor of the trading area focused on modernising the fittings and giving a fairer spread of space to the various insurers in the market. At the time, Carnegie-Brown talked about the challenge of restoring the room’s pre-pandemic hum of activity by making “a compelling case for a handshake over an email, a Room over a Zoom”.
The future of flagship offices has been called into question as many companies have shifted staff to hybrid working and some try to cut their real estate footprint. City of London office vacancy rates have risen to around 11 per cent — the highest since 2009, and higher than the average of 9 per cent across the UK capital.
The City received another boost earlier this year when HSBC announced it would leave its tower in Canary Wharf when the lease expires in 2027, and move to a new headquarters near St Paul’s.
Meanwhile, the West End of London is seeing higher demand from companies, with vacancy at just 6 per cent. Many firms are seeking convenient locations with buzzy retail and food options nearby to entice workers back to the office.
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