After two decades headquartered in the West London suburb of Brentford, GSK is officially coming home to central London.
As of Monday, 3,000 staffers will work through a hybrid working model from the company’s new digs on New Oxford Street, a spokesperson confirmed over email. GSK previously divulged the move in 2022 following a “comprehensive search” of potential new headquarters sites across London.
“Our new headquarters represents an important next step for GSK,” CEO Emma Walmsley said at the time. “As a global biopharma company, we are proud to call London our home and look forward to the opportunities for even closer collaboration with the city’s world-class science, academic and healthcare institutions.”
The drugmaker’s previous spot in Brentford was sold to London-based regeneration specialist Hadley Property Group in 2021. The new owners are reportedly looking to build out a “major mixed-use scheme,” according to local newsletter BrentfordTW8.
GSK opened the doors to its £300 million Brentford location in 2002 as the biggest single commercial development in the U.K. at the time with four five-story buildings and a 16-story tower block. The new building, meanwhile, is “designed for collaboration” and powered by technology that supports “effective hybrid working,” according to the 2022 release.
As well as being close to its R&D global hub and its artificial and machine learning hub, the move to New Oxford represents a return to the company’s roots in central London which stretch all the way back to 1715 with its first global location, Plough Court Pharmacy on Lombard Street.
Now, GSK will settle into the U.K.’s “fast-growing global life sciences hub” in the Knowledge Quarter. The location is close to existing collaboration partners the Francis Crick Institute and King’s College London and was “really important to us” due to the opportunities for further scientific collaboration, CEO of GSK’s HIV subsidiary ViiV Healthcare Deborah Waterhouse said in an interview with The Times.
The new 11-story building neighbors a Google office and features a gym, terraces for yoga and social events and a ground-floor restaurant called the Orangery in a nod to GSK’s orange branding that will use a vertical “farm” to grow its own produce, the Times reported.
GSK’s move comes after the company fully shed its remaining stake in its consumer healthcare spin-out Haleon. The spinoff was completed in 2022 when GSK held a 13% stake and the drugmaker has since sold its last 4.2% holding. All in all, the some 1.2 billion Haleon shares sold went for about 3.9 billion pounds (nearly $5 billion), according to a May filing.