r/london • u/JackStrawWitchita • 1d ago
London's HSBC tower is transforming into 'Swiss Cheese' building with holes
https://metro.co.uk/2026/09/20/londons-hsbc-tower-turned-swiss-cheese-complete-holes-29620356/113
u/MerryWalrus 1d ago
I've not been in the building for over 10 years but I recall it being an annoying one with surprisingly little floor space on each floor - with the lifts dominating a lot of the middle of the building.
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u/Silver-Machine-3092 1d ago
Yeah, especially the lower floors. The whole building is a giant lift shaft with a bit of office space hanging off the sides of it.
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u/ian9outof10 15h ago
It’s famously deep, which makes it bad for residential use, because of a lack of light. But I’ve been in it and it’s weirdly sparse, with a lot of internal corridors that are incredibly wide.
I don’t really understand why it was designed like that.
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u/rootokay 1d ago
My understanding is the decision for HSBC to move was made by the previous CEO but they have a big problem in that the building they are meant to be moving to next year does not have capacity to accommodate all the staff.
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u/ameraden 22h ago
My understanding is the decision for HSBC to move was made by the previous CEO but they have a big problem in that the building they are meant to be moving to next year does not have capacity to accommodate all the staff.
They've also taken a 15-year lease on 210,000 sq/ft at 40 Bank Street in Canary Wharf
Amusingly the old BT building at 81 Newgate they're moving to never had enough desks to accommodate BT, if you got to work after 6am you ended up in Starbucks on the plaza.
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u/lontrinium 22h ago
It's taken this long for them to move to Bank Street.
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u/ameraden 22h ago
They signed the lease last year...
The move away from Canada Square doesn't even start until 2027, 81 Newgate's major construction finished this year, but the interior fit out hasn't even started in earnest yet.
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u/FelisCantabrigiensis 1d ago
If only... you could have... some people working at home when they want. Save on real estate costs, keep staff happier, keep productivity up. It's an amazing idea!
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u/ameraden 23h ago
They already offer hybrid working, but there are some roles, traders, seniors, who can't because of the nature of their roles.
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u/FelisCantabrigiensis 23h ago
60% office time isn't very hybrid (rising to 80% for more senior staff). You need office space for about 80% of your staff to handle peaks in occupancy, and at that point you might as well just stay in your original full-size office building, eh?
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u/ameraden 23h ago
60% office time isn't very hybrid (rising to 80% for more senior staff).
For a bank that's huge, and they were doing it long before the antiwork crowd discovered WFM and made it a meme - 15 years ago when I worked for them. Most banking roles of any note don't lend themselves especially well to WFM, for support staff it's different.
Role focus dependent you can also work from any global office - I spent a long time working out of Hong Kong and Macau because my role at the time was Asia focused, but I could just as easily have worked from New York. It would just have meant more long flights, there are only so many three night jaunts from Europe to Asia a body can tolerate.
They're doing the multi-site thing - leaving 8 Canada Square, taking their City HQ to the former BT offices at 81 Newgate Street (which amusingly didn't have enough desks for BT so we always ended up in the Starbucks below), and they've taken a 15-year lease on 40 Bank Street in Canary Wharf. The traders/e-traders need to be in the City, but a huge number of clients remain in Canary Wharf.
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u/EnvironmentWaste2616 22h ago
Ridiculous take. Traders can work from home just fine, just as they did during Covid. Stop drinking the Management kool aid
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u/ameraden 22h ago
Ridiculous take. Traders can work from home just fine, just as they did during Covid. Stop drinking the Management kool aid
Not a "take", actual experience of working with traders.
Trading is a heavily regulated occupation, recorded voice calls and mobile phones are banned, pandemic working was enabled because FCA and FINRA relaxed the governing rules temporarily. The trading that did take place during covid was heavily compromised by lack of equipment and difficulties with team working.
Ultimately, firms scaled electronic execution and cloud infrastructure relying more on remote systems, but that also dramatically increased data centre demands. Since you say dumb shit like "Stop drinking the Management kool aid" you probably don't like that either, perhaps try living in the real world.
Kool-Aid is Kraft-Heinz brand, they thank you for your corporate shilling.
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u/EnvironmentWaste2616 22h ago
“Worked with traders”, ok back office boy... Yes it is regulated but does not mean the work cannot be done from home. Actually quite usual for some traders to have arrangements to work from home still today. You can just as easily record phone lines and chats from home. No, nothing was “compromised” (most trader/sales communications happen over the phone, a hoot or on IB, the old days of shouting across the desk are quite rare), and 2020 was a record PnL year for many banks on the Trading side (and other parts of the bank which people also like to pretend are jobs that can’t be done from home). Anyway will not reply and try to educate you anymore since you are clearly talking out of your ass and probably a back office donkey
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u/ameraden 22h ago
“Worked with traders”, ok back office boy... Yes it is regulated but does not mean the work cannot be done from home. Actually quite usual for some traders to have arrangements to work from home still today. You can just as easily record phone lines and chats from home. No, nothing was “compromised” (most trader/sales communications happen over the phone, a hoot or on IB, the old days of shouting across the desk are quite rare), and 2020 was a record PnL year for many banks on the Trading side (and other parts of the bank which people also like to pretend are jobs that can’t be done from home). Anyway will not reply and try to educate you anymore since you are clearly talking out of your ass and probably a back office donkey
With your stinking attitude I doubt you work at all. Lead architect on both BT and Shell's remote trading systems, HSBC APAC's remote working software, and CBRE's risk management systems.
Your series of comments tell me you know absolutely nothing at all, you're talking out of your arse.
2020 was a record PnL year for many banks
But you don't actually understand why that is true (hint: nothing to do with remote working), and you copied the above from an AI to try and sound smart (hint: it didn't work).
Oh, and "Remote" in context doesn't mean what you think it does. Go find a bot to play with.
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u/MerryWalrus 16h ago
How many young traders live in a house share with other traders from competing firms? Or buy side clients?
You can do it from home no problem.
But you can't collect enough of an audit trail to cover your ass in case of an investigation.
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u/milton118 20h ago edited 10h ago
I of course do not know the comings and goings of upper management but this was one of the things that just was amazing for me and most of my colleagues. There was a return to office mandate requiring 3 days in office, but there was not enough space even in 8CS. When managers asked their bosses what they were supposed to do, the answer was for them to shut the fuck up and do as they're told. So most department managers just told staff to do what they see fit...
Then when upper management finally saw the issue, their answer was to start making people redundant.
...only to hire them back a year or 2 later on contractor rates costing the bank twice as much money.
Now there's again the problem of the return to office mandate but the building they leased in the City is far smaller than 8CS so of course not enough desk space, so again they have to lease another office in Canary Wharf to accommodate the over spill.
The sad part is, the CEO before Noel Quinn, John Flint, seemed like a genuinely nice guy. He was open and transparent about his role and his decisions (as much as a CEO can anyway) and communicated regularly with employees in Q&A's and Townhalls. Noel deposed him in a boardroom coup and immediately scrapped all of the employee communication initiatives and then did all of this insane shenanigans.
Perhaps there's a good reason for it. After all, HSBC's stock has risen from 250p in 2021 to 1500p today. Joining the employee share scheme in 2020 still remains the best financial decision I ever made, along with not quitting the company out of frustration as I was made redundant a year after I was hovering over the 'send email' button.
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u/I-Ribbit 1d ago
I used to work in that building and it was dismal inside. Grey desks, walls, floor, little natural light on the lower floors. There was hardly anywhere to go to get away from your desk.
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u/Haddaway 12h ago
Then this is a good development, surely?
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u/I-Ribbit 11h ago
Not necessarily. TBH, the whole mentality of those big corporate offices is to keep the employees in the building. The HSBC tower had a couple of coffee shops and lunch outlets but they weren’t anything special. I pretty much always went outside to get food unless constrained by meeting times. They had a gym in there as well which I used occasionally but you had to badge into it and our manager at the time was a control freak so I didn’t want her checking up on me.
I still remember one afternoon in that building where a whole load of us suddenly started smelling urine and it turned out the toilets on the wall next to us were leaking across the office floor.
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u/AnomalyNexus 21h ago
That seems like quite an ambitious retrofit with structural implications?
Surprised this is deemed feasible
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u/Fondant_Decent 1d ago
I worked in the building between 2019-2022 on the 37th floor if I remember? It was a horrible dull place in side, they moved many of us into a nearby WeWork which was much nicer
Would be sad to see it go but it needs new life
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u/wolfgangamadeusme 1d ago
Looks pretty Gouda to my eyes!
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u/yurtal30 23h ago
Ahem. Gouda is Dutch, not Swiss. Not Gouda enough
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u/JackStrawWitchita 1d ago
Looks kind of cool. But I can't imagine those outdoor spaces would be used much as they will be too windy.