NEW YORK CITY-While competitors on a global scale, London and New York’s commercial real estate markets share a similar economic driver: media and technology. As Manhattan continues to emerge as the Silicon Valley of the East, London is also diversifying its tenant base, seeing a rise in activity from non-financial services tenants in the wake of the Eurozone crisis, Digby Flower, partner and head of London markets at Cushman & Wakefield, explains to GlobeSt.com.

“The London market, post-Lehman and the credit crunch, bounced back quickly, and 2010 was really a record year in terms of take-up,” he says during a visit to C&W’s Manhattan offices on Sept. 10. “But that very quickly switched off as we came into 2011 with the Eurozone crisis, so the market has become a lot more subdued since then.”

As a result of the economic downturn, Flower said the characteristic of the market has changed. In 2010, he said 50% of take-up in the London market – roughly 5.5 million square feet – was from banks and financial institutions. During that time, JP Morgan took one of the largest deals in town, leasing one million square feet in Canary Wharf, the former London headquarters of Lehman Bros. after the fall of the financial giant. But in 2011, Flower said the biggest transaction was less than 30,000 square feet.