I rented office space in the Queensway Business Centre for a year in 2007. I chose it because it was well located, spacious, secure and cheap.
They have various sized offices, but the standard one is about 10m long and 4m wide. For this I think I paid in the region of around £400 a month although there are sometimes discounts available.
My office was very basic - just a shell, but I had the advantage of my own access doors to the outside. There was also a security grille at the rear doors, so I could be sure my stock was safe. There is CCTV monitoring anyway, and they're fairly good at keeping an eye on the place - we were questioned several times when arriving late at night or over the weekend.
There is a large communal area and a shared meeting room which you don't have to pay to use - I never did use it and it didn't seem to be in too much demand so I wouldn't be surprised if it got changed into more rental space. There are a couple of kitchens which are very basic and not the cleanest, but they serve a purpose and we only used it for washing dishes as we kept a microwave in the unit.
The offices aren't luxurious, but basic. We just had cream painted breezeblock walls and rather manky carpet tiles to the floor. The heating wasn't great - old storage heaters, so we brought our own in. There were quite a lot of spiders and woodlice who seemed to appear out of nowhere however much we cleaned!
Most annoying thing for me was the pollution -being right across the road from the steelworks, there was all sorts of mess coming in if I left the doors open for ventilation. The staff at the office next door also used to stand right outside to smoke which was really annoying as it came straight in our door - doesn't sound like much but on a daily basis it was quite annoying and a large part of the reason I gave the unit up in the end.
If you're looking for office space though, it's well worth considering as it is a lot of space for your money and you don't have to worry about the building maintenance. read more
