ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 tackles the period of the office economy beginning with the Big Bang boom of the late 1980s and travels through the 1990s crash – perhaps the worst on record. The chapter asks whether the boom-to-bust model is inevitable or avoidable. The second part of the chapter takes a panoramic view of the spatial re-organisation of the office economy in London over the past three decades. It describes the changing physical office economy since the 1980s, through the millennium and up to the current time. The main means of conveying this is a description of the changing business geography to global city of London. The chapter describes how, over three decades, London’s office economy metamorphosed from a small, tightly defined market into a genuinely global city.
