Sony Music is in plans to relocate its current UK headquarters from Kensington to King’s Cross.
The company, who represent music megastars like Beyonce, Bob Dylan and DJ Khaled, are looking to take 124,000 square feet of office space over six floors at 4 Handyside Street.
Sony Music Entertainment currently houses its UK branch at 9 Derry Street, just off Kensington High Street in West London where they take up 97,000 square feet.
If a lease is finalised and Sony move to King’s Cross they will join a handful of the music industry’s biggest players, such as Universal Music and PRS for Music. Universal moved into 4 Pancras Square last year after signing a pre-let for the 177,000 square foot space in 2015. PRS, a royalties and licensing company, take up 52,000 square feet of space at 2 Pancras Square.
4 Handyside Street is owned by developer Argent along with pension fund AustralianSuper, who together form the King’s Cross Central Limited Partnership. Upon completion, The Handyside Street building will consist of eleven floors of Grade A office, including a roof terrace with ‘landscaped gardens’.
Sony’s new building was designed by London Architects, Mossessian Architecture and is due for completion this year.
The building will neighbour Google’s massive headquarters to-be as well as Facebook’s 611,000 square feet office space to-be, in a completely regenerated King’s Cross. So regenerated, in fact, that the area was awarded a new postcode, N1C.
The 4 Handyside Street Building – also called S1, Handyside – sits across from the newly built Coal Drops Yard, a new shopping street for Londoners. The Victorian brick viaducts making up Coal Drops Yard were previously marshalling yards during the industrial revolution, as well as film sets and home to some of London’s biggest raves before being turned into retail space.