Newcastle’s newest business centre has welcomed its first tenant.
Daniel Owen, a national recruitment agency for the construction, engineering, rail and property industries, has moved into Haylofts, which provides innovative office space in the old Newcastle Brewery stables on St Thomas Street, adjacent to Haymarket travel interchange.
The revamped space has 22 offices, seven meeting rooms, a lecture space for 80 and broadband speeds of up to 100Gbps, a first for business centres in Newcastle. Daniel Owen has ten offices across the UK and opened a ‘Northern Hub’ in Newcastle last year. “We’ve been blown away by how well the new Newcastle office has done and needed to relocate to new premises to cater for an increase in team members. We looked around, but once we visited Haylofts we knew we’d found the right place,” said David Gill, MD, of Daniel Owen North. “We’ve also opened offices in Leeds and Glasgow as part of the companies expansion plans. From Haylofts we’re looking to increase our presence and clients across the whole of the North and into Scotland,” he added.
HyHubs, the business centre chain that includes Hoults Yard in Byker and Hypoint in Gateshead, has worked on the former St Thomas Street Stables through 2019/20. Haylofts is now ‘hot-to-trot’ for new business.
Charlie Hoult, HyHubs’ Managing Director, said: “Our mission is to create ‘property with personality’ for customers – with a future-facing combination of tech and configuration. You can see that across Haylofts: we’ve retained great heritage features and built a super-modern pod in the glazed courtyard. “Haylofts is a special place; a hidden gem and people will fall in love with the place when they come through our doors.” Horse-theme branding for Haylofts has been provided by renowned North-East street artist Pete Manning, aka Prefab77, who has created exclusive, bespoke equine wall art for the centre. “Along with Hush, Burgerman, Pixel Pancho and Roa, Pete helped give Hoults Yard its unique character. Pete has an amazing creative talent which keys right into the rich Geordie links with Newcastle Brown Ale, fairground carousel horses, famous horses in history and more. It’s exciting to see how this can link heritage to today,” said Charlie. The area around St Thomas Crescent is a Georgian architectural gem. The stables were built in St Thomas Street for the delivery horses of Robert Deuchar Breweries in an era when the horse was ubiquitous for local transport. Duechar’s was acquired by Newcastle Breweries in 1954.
The site was converted to 8,000 sq ft of workshops and office space in 1986, but had been empty since 2016. “Haylofts couldn’t be more central – adjacent to the Haymarket transport interchange and next to Newcastle University’s main campus. It’s perfect for full-time employees or for a shared office environment for co-working. Despite the lockdown, we’ve had huge interest, so prospective tenants need to hoof it!” said Charlie.
“Being a city centre location, the tech capability of the space was high on our agenda and service providers Aspire offered us their Ultrafast Dedicated Connectivity (UDC) product – a clincher for some tenants. “Our offer is top tech, cool interiors and canny craic – we’ve been buzzing through lockdown and even the builders want an office here!” said Charlie.
Daniel Owen is based in Reading and started in 1986 as a small recruitment agency providing jobs
for blue-collar workers in the construction industry. The company now works with some of the country’s largest and oldest construction companies, engineering companies and local authorities.