For a while, the reasonable-sounding prediction was that remote work and online commerce would make physical location increasingly irrelevant to business success. That prediction has aged unevenly. For some businesses, it’s genuinely true. For most, location still matters — it’s just doing different work than it used to.
Customer-facing businesses haven’t lost their location dependency
For retail, hospitality, and any business relying on passing footfall or local customers, location remains close to as important as it’s ever been — arguably more so, given how much choice London customers now have within easy reach and how quickly they’ll go elsewhere if a location is inconvenient. Online ordering has changed how customers discover and interact with these businesses, but it hasn’t removed the basic fact that a poorly located shop or restaurant starts every day at a disadvantage a well-located competitor doesn’t face.
The cost of getting location wrong compounds quietly
A poorly chosen location rarely produces an obvious, immediate crisis — it tends to show up more slowly, as a steady trickle of lost opportunities that are individually easy to explain away: a candidate who turned down an offer partly because of the commute, a client who chose a more conveniently located competitor, footfall that’s persistently a little lower than a comparable business elsewhere. None of those on their own looks like a location problem. Added together over time, they often are, which is part of why location deserves more upfront scrutiny than it sometimes gets from businesses focused primarily on rent per square foot.
Talent access is now as important as customer access
For businesses less dependent on footfall — professional services, technology companies, agencies — location’s importance has shifted from “where are the customers” toward “where is the talent, and how easily can they get here.” A business in a well-connected location makes itself accessible to a far larger pool of potential employees than one in a harder-to-reach spot, which matters considerably in a labour market as competitive as London’s. Hybrid work has changed how often people need to be in that location, but it hasn’t removed the advantage of being somewhere people can reach without excessive friction on the days they do come in.
Transport connectivity does more work than raw distance
Two locations equidistant from central London on a map can have very different practical value depending on transport links — a location well served by multiple Underground or rail lines functions, in practical terms, as far more central than the map distance alone would suggest, while a location genuinely close by but poorly served by transport can feel considerably more remote to employees, customers, and visitors alike. This is part of why London property values don’t map cleanly onto simple distance from the centre, and why transport access should weigh as heavily as raw location in most business property decisions.
Business clusters still create real value
Certain parts of London have developed strong reputational clusters around particular industries — finance, media, technology, professional services — and being located within or near an established cluster still carries genuine advantages: easier informal networking, proximity to relevant suppliers and service providers, and a location that signals credibility to customers and partners familiar with that industry’s geography. That clustering effect matters as much for early-stage companies trying to build credibility and connections as for established firms simply maintaining their existing networks.
Visibility still matters for the businesses that depend on it
For any business where being seen is part of how customers find it in the first place — retail most obviously, but also many professional and consumer services — physical visibility in a well-trafficked location continues to do real marketing work that’s hard to replace purely through digital channels. A well-located premises functions as a form of ongoing advertising that a purely online presence doesn’t replicate in quite the same way.
What’s actually changed: flexibility, not irrelevance
The honest shift isn’t that location has stopped mattering — it’s that businesses now have more flexibility about how much space, and what kind, they need in a given location. A company might need less office space than it once did while still valuing the same well-connected address; a retailer might need a smaller footprint if online ordering handles part of demand, while still depending heavily on that location’s visibility and footfall for the rest.
Getting this decision wrong is expensive to reverse
Property decisions are among the least flexible a growing business makes — a lease typically locks in a location choice for years, and moving early carries real financial and operational cost. That makes it worth genuinely interrogating what a business needs from a location before committing, rather than defaulting to wherever seems conventional for the industry or wherever a good deal happens to be available at the time. A slightly higher rent in the right location is frequently cheaper, over the life of a lease, than a lower rent somewhere that turns out not to actually serve the business’s real needs.
The practical takeaway
Choosing where to locate a London business is still a genuinely consequential decision — it just requires a more specific answer now than “somewhere central” or “somewhere cheap.” The businesses making this decision well are asking what location actually needs to deliver for their specific model — customers, talent, cluster effects, visibility — rather than assuming location matters uniformly less across the board just because some of its traditional functions have changed.
