For more than fifty years Unilever has been part of Kingston without most people noticing. That changed in July, when around 1,200 of its people moved into a purpose-built headquarters in the middle of the town.
The opening of the Unilever Kingston upon Thames campus is interesting for more than its scale. A company with the whole of the country to choose from, and six years to think about it, put its UK and Ireland headquarters here. That is a judgement about what this town offers, and it is a useful one to borrow if you are deciding where to put your own business. This is an operator's read on what actually happened, why a company that size chose Kingston, what it changes for everyone else in the borough, and, just as usefully, what it does not change at all.
01What Unilever has actually done
The building is called Sunlight House, at 22 Eden Street, a few minutes' walk from the Bentall Centre and the river. The name reaches back to Port Sunlight, the factory and village built by Unilever's founder William Lever, which tells you how the company wants it read: not as an office it happens to occupy, but as somewhere it intends to stay. It runs to roughly 200,000 sq ft, forms part of a larger campus, and opened on 9 July 2026 with the local MP Sir Ed Davey presiding. It holds around 1,200 people, brought together from several separate offices, and represents a multi-million-pound investment made over about six years.
The specification tells you what the money was for. A 250-seat auditorium, a gym and exercise studio, a hair salon, a market hall restaurant and a staff shop. More unusually, there are working home kitchens and bathrooms inside the building, so products can be tested and filmed in something resembling a real house rather than a lab. The environmental standard is the part with consequences for everyone else letting space in this town: reused and low-carbon materials, refurbished furniture, finishes made from recycled textiles, around 100 tonnes of embodied carbon saved in the steel structure alone, solar panels, rainwater harvesting, and water systems designed to use about 40 per cent less than a comparable building. It is targeting Platinum LEED and Platinum WELL certification alongside an EPC A rating, which would put it among the first workplaces in the country holding both of those at the top level.
Accessibility was designed in rather than retrofitted, which is rarer than it should be: every workstation is fully wheelchair accessible, with accessible tea points, colour contrast and easy-grip fittings throughout, and layouts meant to suit neurodivergent colleagues and different ways of working. The local thread runs through it too, in the public art by Clarke and Scholes that refers to Kingston's relationship with the Thames and its salmon fishing history, and in pieces made with students from local schools.
The line worth holding on to came from Unilever's press release announcing the opening of the Kingston campus. Alice Taylor, Head of HR for Unilever UK and Ireland and the site lead for Kingston, said the opening "reaffirms our commitment to Kingston, where we have had a presence for more than 50 years."
More than fifty years. This is not a business discovering the town. It is a business that already knew it, weighing every option available, and choosing to stay. Nor was it an isolated bet on bricks: earlier the same year Unilever completed a 150 million pound investment in manufacturing and distribution at Port Sunlight. A company spending at that level across the country still put its UK and Ireland headquarters here.
Unilever did not discover Kingston. It confirmed it.
02Why a company that size chose Kingston
For a long time the question for a head office was binary: central London, or somewhere cheaper and further out. That framing has quietly stopped being useful. The question now is what a location can actually do for the business and the people in it, and the answer has several parts: how easily staff can get there, what the building itself is like to work in, what is around it at lunchtime, how well connected it is to clients, and whether people want to be there on a Tuesday when nobody is making them.
Kingston does well on all of those at once, which is rarer than it sounds. There are two mainline stations, Kingston and Norbiton, with direct South Western Railway services reaching London Waterloo in around half an hour. The A3 puts the M25 and Heathrow within easy reach by road, which matters for anyone with visitors or a field team. There is a genuine town centre rather than a business park, so lunch, a bank, a haircut and the shops are all a walk away, and the river is there when the weather behaves. And the residential catchment across south-west London and Surrey is deep, so a large employer can recruit from a wide area without asking anybody to commute into zone one.
That last point is the commercial one. When staff can reach the office in half the time and at a fraction of the cost of a central London commute, attendance and retention both improve without a policy being written. For a headquarters of 1,200 people, that is not a soft benefit. It is the business case. The borough's own economic profile, published by Kingston Council, has been pointing at the same combination of connectivity, skilled residents and town-centre investment for years.
03What it changes for everyone else in the borough
Less than the headline suggests in the short term, and more than you would think over a few years.
Sir Ed Davey, the MP for Kingston and Surbiton, who opened the building, framed it as "a fantastic investment in our borough, bringing high-quality jobs, supporting local businesses and reinforcing Kingston's reputation as a vibrant hub for innovation and growth." That is a politician's sentence, and broadly right, but the timescales are worth separating.
In the short term, most of those 1,200 people already worked in the borough. The town has not suddenly gained a new population. What it has gained is a visible, permanent statement that a company of that size looked at the alternatives and chose here, which changes how Kingston reads to businesses who had never seriously considered it. We notice this in the enquiries. People who would previously have compared Richmond and Hammersmith now put Kingston on the list, and they arrive already half-convinced.
Over a longer horizon there are two effects that matter more. The first is gravity. Suppliers, agencies, consultancies and partner teams have always liked being near their largest client, and video calls have not changed that as much as everyone expected. Being twenty minutes away, able to be in the room the same morning, still wins work. A concentration of 1,200 decision-makers in one building pulls smaller businesses toward it.
The second is straightforward competition for space. When a town becomes more desirable, the best offices in it get taken first and terms firm up. That is not a scare tactic, it is just what happens, and it happens slowly enough to be easy to ignore until the suite you wanted has gone. If you have been putting off a decision about Kingston for a year, the cost of continuing to wait is a little higher than it was.
What will not happen is an overnight transformation. A headquarters is not a regeneration scheme, and one building does not fix the parts of a town centre that need work. Treat it as a strong signal rather than a step change, and you will read it correctly.
04The part it does not solve
Here is the thing a piece like this usually leaves out. A campus built for a corporate at that scale does very little for a team of twelve, and it is worth being clear about why.
Space that becomes available around a scheme of this kind arrives in large floorplates on long commitments. That is exactly right for an occupier taking a floor for two hundred people and planning five years ahead. It is the wrong shape entirely for a business that needs four rooms in six weeks, cannot sign a decade away, and wants the option to add a room in the spring without moving. The two needs look similar on a map and are nothing alike in practice.
| At a glance | A 1,200 person headquarters | A 5 to 40 person team |
|---|---|---|
| Timescale | Six years from decision to opening | A decision this quarter, in by next |
| Commitment | A long lease on a whole campus | Short and rolling, with room to change |
| Fit-out | Designed from scratch over years | Fitted to a brief in weeks |
| What flexibility means | Subletting surplus floors | Adding or dropping a room as the team moves |
| Parking | Planned in from the start | Usually the thing that is missing |
| Biggest risk | Committing to the wrong size for a decade | Outgrowing the space and having to move again |
So the useful conclusion from Unilever's decision is not "there will be space near them". It is "the reasoning that led a very well advised company to Kingston applies to you too, at your size". That is the part you can actually act on.
05What to look for in Kingston office space now
If the move has put Kingston on your list, these are the things we would tell you to check, in the order they tend to matter. They are the questions we answer on the phone most weeks.
- Be honest about headcount in eighteen months, not today. Most regret in this market comes from taking exactly the right space for the team you had when you signed.
- Ask what happens when you grow, in that same building. Being able to move from a room to a suite to a floor without another search is worth more than any single feature.
- Establish what all-inclusive actually covers. Fibre, cleaning, reception, utilities, meeting-room time and service charge should all be named, not implied.
- Treat parking as a real constraint, because in any town centre it is. Ask how many spaces, whether they are allocated, and whether visitors can use them.
- Ask about the EPC rating and any certifications. The standard being set across town is Platinum level, and occupiers with their own reporting obligations increasingly have to ask their landlord what their clients ask them.
- Test the connectivity rather than reading about it. A video call that holds up at four o'clock is the only proof that counts.
- Walk it. From the station to the door, and from the door to lunch. Five minutes of walking tells you more than an hour of floorplans, which flatter every building ever drawn.
- Check the terms you can leave on, not just the ones you arrive on. Flexibility you never use still costs nothing, and the one time you need it, it is everything.
Our complete guide to office space in Kingston upon Thames goes through each of these in more depth, and the Kingston office connectivity index sets out every route into the town by train, road and bike if commute times are the deciding factor.
06Where The Smith sits in this
We should declare the obvious interest. The Smith is a Grade A building at 145 London Road, around three quarters of a mile from Sunlight House and roughly a fifteen minute walk, so we are writing about our own back garden.
What we offer is the other half of the picture described above. The building takes teams from one person to around a hundred, in three ways: self-contained offices to rent and fitted suites, serviced offices and co-working on all-inclusive flexible terms, and whole floors of up to 8,450 sq ft that can be split. Suites are subdividable and fitted to a brief, which in practice means a team can start with a room, take the room next door a year later, and end up with a floor without ever running another search. There are more than 100 on-site parking spaces with EV charging, superfast fibre, a manned reception, secure cycle storage and showers. Kingston and Norbiton stations are each about ten minutes away on foot. The building and getting here cover the detail.
And the honest limit: if you need a hundred thousand square feet, we are not the answer and would say so on the first call. What we are good at is the size of business that actually makes up most of Kingston's economy, the ones who need to move quickly, be taken seriously by their own clients when they visit, and not be punished for growing.
Common questions
Unilever's UK and Ireland headquarters is Sunlight House, 22 Eden Street, Kingston upon Thames KT1 2BA, in the middle of the town centre. It is a purpose-built office of around 200,000 sq ft, part of a wider campus, and it houses about 1,200 people.
The campus opened officially on 9 July 2026, after roughly six years of design and construction and a multi-million-pound investment. It brings together global and UK teams that had been spread across several offices.
No. Unilever has had a presence in Kingston for more than fifty years. The new campus is a commitment to a town it already knew well rather than a company discovering somewhere new, which is part of why the decision is worth paying attention to.
Not overnight. Most of those 1,200 people already worked in the borough. What it does is raise confidence in Kingston as a business location, and attention of that kind usually reaches the best space first. Good Grade A space with real parking tends to be taken earliest, so it is worth looking sooner rather than later.
Yes. The Smith is at 145 London Road, around three quarters of a mile from Sunlight House and roughly a fifteen minute walk, with more than 100 on-site parking spaces, superfast fibre and both Kingston and Norbiton stations about ten minutes away on foot.
Anything from one person at a desk to a team of around a hundred. Suites can be subdivided and whole floors run to 8,450 sq ft and can be split, so a team can start small and grow inside the same building rather than moving again.
07What the Unilever Kingston upon Thames move is really telling you
Strip out the auditorium and the hair salon and what is left is a simple piece of reasoning. A company that could have gone anywhere weighed up commute times, the quality of the building, what surrounds it and where its people actually live, and concluded that Kingston upon Thames was the right place to put its headquarters for the next couple of decades. The same four things decide it for a team of fifteen. The scale is different, the logic is identical.
I have watched this town from the inside of one building for several years now, through the period when everyone was certain the office was finished, and the thing that strikes me about the Unilever decision is how unsentimental it is. Nobody spends six years and that kind of money on a location out of loyalty. They did the sums. So the question I would put back to you, if you are sitting somewhere that no longer fits and telling yourself it will do for another year, is a plain one: if a business with every option available did the sums and chose here, what exactly is your reason for staying where you are?
If the answer is "nothing much, we just have not looked", come and look. We will tell you honestly if The Smith is wrong for you.
Thinking about Kingston?
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