Capital move for Amazon
Amazon has announced that its move to London is now complete, and more than 2,000 employees – the majority of whom were previously based in Slough – have taken up residency in three locations across the capital. The three offices are 60 Holborn Viaduct, which is the new Amazon UK corporate headquarters; Glasshouse Yard near the Barbican; and Leadenhall Court.
In a statement issued yesterday (15 June), Amazon added that it “expects to hire hundreds of new employees across the three London sites in 2015 alone, having already recruited more than 1,000 corporate employees in new positions in the last three years”.
Christopher North, the Managing Director at Amazon UK, said: “The move to the capital was vitally important to our continued growth in the UK.”
Amazon said that the move to the three office locations in London was “just the start” of its plans for the UK capital. In 2017, the company will open a new building at Principal Place in Shoreditch which will provide enough total capacity to house 5,000 employees.
“We now have in excess of 2,000 permanent employees based in London in addition to the thousands of permanent employees in our UK fulfilment and customer service centres across the UK,” said North. “We’re enabling tens of thousands of UK businesses to sell their products worldwide through Amazon Marketplace, powering British entrepreneurs and business start-ups through Amazon Web Services, and we have invested well over £1 billion in our UK infrastructure. The building of our new office in Shoreditch is a further illustration of the important role that London and the UK will play in our global operations.”
In addition to its corporate offices, Amazon will also open a 46,000 sq ft fashion photography studio in Shoreditch this summer. The studio will be one of the largest of its kind in Europe and produce hundreds of thousands of on and off model images every year.
Amazon now has over 8,000 permanent employees in the UK.
In related news, it was recently reported that the company will open its 13th delivery station in the UK, at a location in Sunderland.
