More than 2,500 Lloyds Banking Group employees have a new place to work in Cardiff this week.
The banking group opened its new John Street office on Monday, 28 September, bringing thousands of staff into a new city-centre workplace. But perhaps the most interesting thing about the building is not how many people it can hold. It is what Lloyds has chosen to put inside it.
Alongside the usual desks and meeting rooms, there are flexible working areas, spaces designed for people to work together, a work café, events space and a roof terrace.
It is a long way from the old idea of an office as somewhere people travel to each morning, sit at the same desk all day and leave at five.
And Lloyds is quite open about that. The bank says the Cardiff building is part of a wider plan to create “fewer, better equipped offices” across the UK.
The office hasn’t disappeared. Its job has changed
For a while, it looked as though working from home might leave Britain’s big office buildings struggling to find a purpose.
Five years on from the pandemic, the picture is less clear-cut.
Hybrid working has stuck around at many large employers, but companies are still spending money on physical workplaces. The difference is what they expect those workplaces to do.
Lloyds’ new Cardiff office is a good example. Its mix of meeting areas, shared spaces and places to work together suggests the office is no longer designed only around giving every employee somewhere to sit.
There has been investment in the building itself too. The office is all-electric and has solar panels, air-source heat pumps and living walls. Lloyds says it should save around 422 tonnes of CO2 each year and has achieved a BREEAM Excellent rating.
The result is an office built around a workforce that may use the building differently from the way it would have a decade ago.
Good office space is becoming harder to find in Cardiff
Lloyds is not making that investment in an empty market.
Figures from property company JLL show that 200,679 sq ft of Cardiff office space was taken up during the second quarter of 2026. That was well above the five-year quarterly average of 75,300 sq ft.
There is a fairly large catch in those numbers. The total was pushed up by Cardiff and Vale College buying the 145,000 sq ft St William House, so it would be wrong to suggest businesses suddenly snapped up three times as much office space as normal.
Another figure tells a more interesting story. Across Cardiff, 9.3% of office space was vacant at the end of the quarter. For the best Grade A offices, however, that fell to just 2.2%.
In other words, Cardiff has empty offices. What it has far less of is the type of high-quality space many organisations now want. Prime office rents reached £32 per sq ft during the same quarter, their first increase since the middle of 2023.
Changing an office means deciding what stays
There is another side to the move towards newer, better-equipped workplaces that is much less likely to appear in photographs of a newly opened office.
What happens to everything from the old one?
A big office can contain hundreds or even thousands of desks and chairs, as well as screens, meeting tables, filing units and other equipment. If the new workplace is designed differently, not all of it will necessarily have a place there.
That makes moving office less about packing everything onto a lorry and recreating the same workplace somewhere else.
Businesses may need to decide what should move, what can be reused somewhere else and what needs to be stored while the new space is being prepared. Furniture can also arrive at different stages rather than all at once, especially when a building is still being fitted out.
It is a familiar problem for companies involved in office relocations. A spokesperson for commercial logistics company SFI said:
“An office move isn’t always about taking everything from one building and putting it into another anymore. Businesses are often using the move as a chance to decide what they actually need.
“That means working out what moves with them, what can be reused elsewhere and what needs to be stored or removed. On a big move, those decisions need to happen well before moving day.”
Moving office is becoming an editing job
For smaller businesses, changing the layout might mean losing a few desks and adding a bigger meeting table. Scale that up to an employer with thousands of workers and the job becomes much bigger.
It also explains why the physical office still matters even when staff are not there every day.
If employees are travelling in to meet their team, work on a project or spend time with colleagues, a building filled almost entirely with individual desks may no longer make much sense. Space that once held rows of workstations can instead become somewhere to meet, talk or work as a group.
That does not mean the traditional desk is disappearing. Plenty of work still needs one. It does mean businesses have more choices to make about how much space is given to desks and what they do with everything that no longer fits the plan.
Lloyds’ new Cardiff office makes that change unusually easy to see. More than 2,500 people now have a new workplace in the centre of the city. The bigger story may be that one of Cardiff’s largest employers still sees enough value in the office to invest in a new one, while completely rethinking what people should find when they get there.