Heritage reborn
Oxford Properties
The client:
Oxford Properties is a real estate investor, developer and manager that manages $83.6 billion of assets across four continents.
The task:
Neo-classical office buildings like Victoria House aren’t considered typical candidates to be redeveloped into labs, but local knowledge, a bold vision for adaptive reuse and insights gathered from mature markets gave Oxford Properties the conviction to bet against conventional wisdom.
Kent Nordic provides consultancy services to Oxford Properties spanning writing, editing and strategic advice. This article is part of a series.
The role:
Content strategy, writing
Read the full publication on the Oxford Properties website, or check out a snippet below:
From insurer to innovator: the reinvention of Victoria House
Close your eyes and imagine a life sciences lab, and we bet it doesn’t look like Victoria House in London’s Bloomsbury neighbourhood.
That’s because neo-classical buildings designed and built more than a century ago aren’t considered typical candidates to be redeveloped into labs. Victoria House is a slice of British history; it was constructed for an insurer that pioneered life insurance for the working classes. The building overlooks Bloomsbury Square, which dates back to the 1660s and is among London’s oldest garden squares.
“We knew that conversions were a good way of beating the competition by two years to eighteen months.”
- Robin Everall, Head of Development, Europe, at Oxford Properties.
We are converting Victoria House into 300,000 square feet (sq ft) of state-of-the-art life sciences space at a time when the London life science and biotech sectors are experiencing a marked upswing in fundraising. Companies headquartered in the capital raised £752 million in Q1, a 305% increase compared to the previous quarter and 64% of the total raised in 2024, according to real estate consultancy DTRE. Laboratory take-up is rising in step with this momentum. Leasing reached 20,200 sq ft in the first three months of 2025 - twice the volume recorded during the same period last year - as more companies look to scale their operations.
This will be no easy feat. Historic buildings like Victoria House are rightly protected by law, so there are tight restrictions as to how they can be redeveloped. Lab operators also have a list of technical features that they need from buildings, and many modern customers want them to be as energy efficient as possible – another factor that would usually rule out historic properties like Victoria House. These are among the many reasons that, when people think of labs, they imagine ultra-modern buildings on industrial estates in the outskirts of cities.
“It's an unusual one: I don’t think many people would pick a grade II listed building and a former insurance headquarters as an ideal candidate to convert into a life sciences building, certainly one that's occupied by a number of customers as well, so we've set ourselves a big challenge to deliver that,” says Robin Everall, Head of Development, Europe, at Oxford Properties. “Thankfully, our North American colleagues have significant experience in life science conversions and have supported us from the outset.”
Oxford began investing in the life sciences sector in 2017 with the acquisition of 645 Summer Street in Boston, which gave us hands on experience in the design, leasing, construction and management of innovation space for lab customers. In 2021, we expanded our reach by acquiring numerous life sciences properties in key markets including San Francisco, Seattle and Boston. Globally, we now have 5 million sq ft of incubation, R&D and biomanufacturing space.
Spending time in Boston and San Francisco offered the UK team a vital perspective on “what the right product would be for the relatively nascent London market”, Robin says. “We were able to blend our knowledge of local market dynamics with a broader perspective of industry best practice, particularly when it came to the specification and the performance of the property: what do occupiers really need compared to just going with the prevailing knowledge."