When Radio 1 descended on Maidstone for its annual music festival, One Big Weekend, at Mote Park in May 2008, it spoke volumes about how the town's image has changed. It now boasts the largest economy in Kent and the town's shopping precinct is ranked in the top five retail centres in the south-east. At more than 1m sq ft of floor space, it is bigger than Bluewater.

Although investment and demand for offices is there, the supply is slowing, especially within the Town Centre, where a lack of grade A space has led to rental values plummeting.  "Maidstone is quite unusual because in the town there hasn't been any new supply, whereas out of town the story is different," says Carina Sampson at Knight Frank. "In the town centre, it is dated stock. Because rents in Kent do lag behind more established office locations like the Thames Valley, it is just not worth dropping a building and putting a new one in its place."

This is why the town's out-of-town offices have been able to achieve headline rents of £24/sq ft at Eclipse Park and Kings Hill in West Malling. Eclipse Park's 88,000 sq ft second phase is under construction and 38,000 sq ft has been preleased by Towergate Insurance. Planning applications for a third phase of 200,000 sq ft of offices to be completed in 2010 will be submitted later this summer. It could eventually grow to 18 acres of offices.

Gallagher Group, the team behind Eclipse Park, went into the development speculatively two years ago - a risk, even in a successful office market, but it has subsequently paid off. "We launched Eclipse Park as a speculative business development and a lot of people said that was very brave, or really stupid," says Pat Gallagher, chairman of Gallagher Group. "But it has worked. There are occupiers who want to be in the town, who need the space. Where else can you get a town with four major motorway junctions serving it? Even Reading has only got three."

However, David Hicken, dha Planning believes confidence in Maidstone's office sector is growing and supply will start to creep up. "If one or two people start to invest in Maidstone, it breeds confidence. You can have all the masterplans in the world but they are just coloured pictures," he says."What matters is action on the ground, where you can show other investors that the vision is now materialising. Maidstone now has that." He continued, "The Thames Gateway is growing and Ashford is growing. Maidstone shouldn't get left behind."

John Foster, economic development manager at Maidstone Borough Council, says it recognises the town's successes and is building on them. "Maidstone has intrinsically got the right qualities to be the commercial, office and shopping centre of Kent because its location is second to none." He continued: "We have recently become a growth point and the government has entered into a partnership with the council, recognising our ambitions for growth. We want to increase the residential in the town but we want to balance that with employment growth and increase Maidstone's profile as an employment area."