page_title: Green Park Business Park
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Green Park Business Park / History
caption_attribution_description: Stuff at Green park lake, Cisco Reading.
context_page_description: Green Park is a business park near junction 11 of the M4 motorway on the outskirts of the English town of Reading. The park opened in 1999, and is currently owned by Mapletree. It covers 195 acres and comprises 19 office buildings arranged around the Longwater, a central lake and wildlife habitat. The buildings provide 1,500,000 square feet of office space, and in excess of 6,500 people work on site.
  The site is bounded by the M4 motorway to the south, the Madejski Stadium and the A33 road to the east, the site of the proposed Green Park Village to the north, and the Reading to Basingstoke railway line to the west. From a local government perspective it is largely located within the borough of Reading, but partly in the civil parish of Shinfield within the borough of Wokingham.
  The development has been awarded a national Civic Trust Award for its landscape design, architecture and community involvement.
context_section_description: Green Park was developed by Prudential and PRUPIM on what was once an area of low lying and poor quality agricultural land. The fact that the land was prone to flooding necessitated the construction of flood alleviation features, including the central Longwater lake and the realigned Foudry Brook.
  The park was opened in February 1999. Initially Cisco Systems committed to taking 607,000 square feet (56,400 m²) of office space, with options on a further 617,000 square feet (57,300 m²). However the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001 led to a severe scaling back of Cisco's requirements, and resulted in five of their buildings remaining empty for many years.
  The park was purchased by Oxford Properties in November 2011, and in the following year they came to an agreement with Cisco whereby the latter company paid a premium in order to surrender its leases on 517,000 square feet (48,000 m²) of space, retaining only a much smaller amount of space. In 2014, the park was awarded a Civic Trust Award in the public realm class for its landscape design, architecture and community involvement. Green Park was sold to Mapletree in May 2016 for £560m.
caption: The central lake makes a virtue of the necessity of flood alleviation measures
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