Office Fit-Out Soho

Office fit-out in Soho tends to mean an upper floor or a small suite in a period building, taken by a studio, an agency or a professional practice, sometimes with a shop below and flats above. Westminster's building control, the Fire Safety Order and your landlord's licence for alterations set the rules, and the neighbours set the hours. We strip out and build partitions, ceilings, lighting, power, tea points and WCs to your designer's drawings, and hand the floor back ready to work in.

For Soho, the construction part of an office fit-out is published at £70 to £120 per sq ft as a UK guide, and an all-in London office fit-out at £148 to £359 per sq ft (Oktra and Cushman and Wakefield, 2026). GS Renovation Ltd, a building contractor based in Potters Bar, does the work in Soho: we build the office partitions, ceilings, lighting and finishes as one contract and coordinate the IT supplier and specialist trades around them.

Soho office floors and the Central Activities Zone

Soho's offices sit in the Central Activities Zone, where Westminster has protected office floor space from conversion. Its Article 4 Direction removing Class E to C3 rights in the zone was made on 14 July 2021, modified by the Secretary of State on 22 July 2022, and as modified covers the Soho Special Policy Area. For an office tenant that is background rather than a task: it keeps these floors in commercial use, so fitting out for a business stays the working assumption.

An office in Soho can be a floor above a shop, a studio in an old workshop building or a suite of rooms off a narrow stair, often with period windows, timber floors and limited riser space. That is why a Soho office fit-out is planned around the building rather than a grid: where the cables can run, how the stair doubles as the escape route, and how much weight an old floor takes. If the building is listed, listed building consent covers works inside as well as out, so new partitions, ceilings and cable routes may need it too.

What Westminster counts as a fit out in a Soho office

Westminster building control defines a fit out as alterations to an existing office or shop where no structural alterations take place. That covers most of what a small Soho office job involves: new partitions, ceilings, lighting, power, data, toilets and a finish, inside a shell that stays as it is. Once a beam is cut or a floor is opened for a new stair, the work stops being a fit out in that sense and needs a structural engineer's design.

Because an office is a workplace, the Fire Safety Order applies to it, and Westminster only accepts a building notice where the work is outside that Order and does not change the layout. A Soho office fit out therefore needs full plans, whether it goes to the council or to a registered building control approver. We ask your designer for fire strategy drawings early, since escape routes, alarm zones and door ratings decide where the partitions can go, with Part M access and Part L lighting checked alongside.

Cat A and Cat B on a Soho office floor

Cat A and Cat B are the two halves of an office fit-out, and it helps to know which one you are buying. Cat A is the landlord's shell made usable: a clean ceiling, lighting, heating and cooling, small power, finished floors and working WCs. Cat B is the tenant's layer: meeting rooms, glazed screens, a tea point or kitchenette, furniture, signage inside and the data cabling your IT supplier specifies. We price the two separately so each side sees its share of a Soho floor.

Westminster publishes a worked example for the building control charge on a non-structural fit out of three storeys of an office, split into a plan charge and an inspection charge. The point for a Soho tenant is that fees follow the cost of the notifiable work. A Cat B layout with new partitions, lighting and fire alarm changes is still a building control job, even where the landlord's Cat A work was signed off before you moved in.

Working in an occupied Soho building, and leaving it

A Soho office fit-out rarely has an empty building around it. Noisy work runs Monday to Friday 8am to 6pm and Saturday 8am to 1pm, and anything noisy outside those hours needs a Section 61 application at least 28 days ahead. Quiet work such as data cabling, ceiling tiles and decoration can go into evenings where the landlord agrees. As the client of a commercial project, you also have duties of your own under the CDM Regulations, which we explain before the start.

Think about the end of the lease before the start of the fit-out. If your lease carries a reinstatement clause, at the end a landlord can claim dilapidations for partitions, cabling and finishes left behind. We record the Soho floor as found, with dated photographs, and keep a schedule of what we installed, so the strip out at lease end is scoped from facts rather than argued about, and the landlord's surveyor sees the same record.

• Data containment laid for your IT supplier to cable
• Strip-out of the previous tenant's office, with disposal
• Raised access floors laid, repaired or adapted for new desk layouts

VOA Council Tax stock of properties, March 2025, for the Fitzrovia West & Soho statistical area, which also covers west Fitzrovia. Counts rounded by the VOA.

When comparing office fit-out in Soho with other work, it helps to read commercial fit-out in Soho, office fit-out across Westminster, what a main building contractor does, how snagging works at handover, how we handle office fit-out across London and Lighting Guide.

Trusted Office Fit-Out in Soho

An office only earns its rent once your team can work in it, so the fit-out has to run to a date agreed at the start. We work from your designer's drawings and fire strategy, set out a programme with strip out, first fix, ceilings, partitions and finishes in order, and coordinate the data cabling with your IT supplier. One contact runs the site, and the fire alarm, electrical and gas certificates come from the registered installers before handover.

• Neighbours given notice before the noisy stages
• Office strip-out and core drilling booked outside other tenants' working hours
• One named contact for the landlord, the building manager and your office manager

Checked by Abdelaaziz Saaid, founder and director of GS Renovation Ltd (Companies House no. 14611254).