This borough is set for London's largest projected increase in office space over the next decade. Your future customers have not arrived yet.

Lambeth

Waterloo and the South Bank at one end, Streatham and Norwood at the other: a borough that changes economy as it runs from the river to the suburbs.

The borough's Local Plan, adopted 22 September 2021, sets place policies from PN1 to PN11 that trace a single north-south axis with three distinct economies on it. At the northern tip, Waterloo, South Bank and Vauxhall/Nine Elms sit inside the Central Activities Zone: offices, national cultural institutions around the Royal Festival Hall and the Southbank Centre, hotels and a large commuter and visitor market. The middle of the borough, Brixton, Stockwell, Clapham, Kennington and Herne Hill, is dense and mixed, market- and night-time-economy led, and Brixton itself carries a Mayor of London Creative Enterprise Zone designation. The southern end, Streatham, West Norwood, Tulse Hill and Upper Norwood, is suburban high-street London, serving residential catchments the way any outer parade does.

This borough also carries more organised promotion than any of the other areas in this set: six Business Improvement Districts operate here, Brixton BID, Clapham Business Community, InStreatham, South Bank BID, Vauxhall One and We Are Waterloo, more than Camden's five, Islington's two, or Barnet's and Haringey's one each. That means a business here is trading inside some of the most professionally marketed districts in London, and a site that looks amateur next to that activity reads as smaller than the business actually is, whichever of the six BID areas, or none of them, it sits in.

The distinguishing fact here is what has not happened yet. A report commissioned by the council found the borough due London's biggest increase in office space over the next decade, an estimated six million square feet concentrated at Waterloo, South Bank and Vauxhall/Nine Elms, and identifies life sciences, low-carbon and creative-digital businesses as sectors gravitating this way, particularly around Brixton as well. Article 4 Directions targeting Class MA conversions already protect commercial floorspace across the Central Activities Zone and in Brixton and Streatham from being lost to housing. The office space is still a projection, not a completed building, which means the customers who will fill it have not moved in either.