Google’s £1bn King’s Cross landscraper headquarters is nearing completion but faces continued delays, with fresh reports of foxes moving into the building and water damage affecting interior works. Despite the structure being largely complete and its monumental presence already reshaping the King’s Cross skyline, industry sources now expect the opening to slip deep into 2026. The project, designed by Heatherwick Studio and Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), stretches an extraordinary 330 metres across the site (longer than The Shard is tall) and at 11 storeys high is one of London’s most ambitious commercial builds. Yet the gleaming 1-million-square-foot building remains unoccupied, its future employees still housed across other Google offices while the long and complex fit-out continues.
The landscraper was originally forecast to open years ago, but its timeline has repeatedly shifted. The interior is designed to house up to 7,000 staff across huge open-plan floors, with integrated sports and wellness facilities, and a 300-metre landscaped rooftop garden containing 40,000 tonnes of soil, a running track, and 250 trees. What was meant to be a symbol of Google’s deep-rooted commitment to London has instead become a symbol of how even the world’s wealthiest tech giants cannot escape post-pandemic uncertainty, supply chain instability, and escalating construction complexity.
One of the most unusual and symbolic stories to emerge from the site involves urban foxes. Reports from London Centric revealed that foxes have been entering parts of the building for over three years, with at least one vixen spotted regularly moving between upper floors and digging burrows in the engineered rooftop soil. Workers have found fox droppings scattered throughout the garden areas, an echo of a similar incident during the construction of The Shard in 2011, when a fox, later nicknamed Romeo, famously lived at the top of the tower for several weeks. While Google’s spokesperson downplayed the situation, calling fox sightings pretty common on construction sites, the persistence of the animals—and their ability to access the higher floors, highlights how long the project has remained unfinished and unoccupied.
Alongside the wildlife, the development has faced material setbacks including significant water damage to timber floors, which required full remediation and contributed to the prolonged fit-out. The challenges are compounded by unprecedented post-COVID commercial uncertainty, fluctuating global real estate needs, supply chain bottlenecks, and severe inflationary pressures on materials and labour. The building’s internal package, one of the largest corporate fit-outs in the UK, is being delivered by ISG under a contract valued above £150 million, awarded in late 2023. Originally expected to be completed sooner, the fit-out now represents one of the major factors behind the shifting timeline.
The delays matter far beyond the Google campus. As a flagship anchor of the King’s Cross regeneration zone (a 67-acre transformation delivering homes, offices, public realm and cultural spaces) its completion is central to the area’s long-term economic and employment strategy. A delayed opening softens the momentum of London’s tech cluster, affects contractor pipelines reliant on predictable sequencing, and feeds into broader concerns about the viability of mega-office developments at a time when hybrid working has reshaped corporate real estate strategy. The ripple effects extend across specialist subcontractors, digital infrastructure providers, sustainability consultants, timber suppliers, and high-end interior manufacturers, all of whom depend on the stability of such large-scale projects.
Even with the structure essentially complete, industry insiders remain cautious. Google’s standards for detail, digital integration, environmental performance and user experience are among the most demanding in the global corporate real estate sector. Major fit-outs of this scale often require 12–18 months of work even under ideal conditions, and with the scale of remedial works already carried out, further flexibility on the timeline is widely expected. For now, the landscraper stands finished but not functional, a striking presence on the King’s Cross skyline, yet one that tells the story of modern construction’s fragility, where global economic pressure, material failures, and even a few bold foxes can slow a billion-pound megaproject to a crawl.
In time, the landscraper will open and become a centrepiece of London’s tech landscape. But as of today, the most surprising occupants are not software engineers or AI teams, but the foxes that have made themselves at home in one of the world’s most expensive office buildings, perhaps the most unintended tenants in London’s construction history.