Work + Play: What it Looks like in Post-Covid London

Nothing gives me greater relief that I work for myself than hearing how much multi-billion corporations care for their employees. What miraculously procured mountains of money are spent promoting women or minorities, only for statistics to mysteriously stay the same. Or what lovingly enforced strategies are cooked up to make us more productive for our own good?! They even harness design to winch the most out of us.

The Taylorist model was dreamt up in the 1900s as part of the Efficiency Movement. It aimed to imitate factory assembly lines in offices by assigning people simple, repetitive tasks, thus ensuring unbroken workflow (and, no doubt, suicide-inducing monotony).

The 1950s had Bürolandschaft, which briefly introduced the idea of – gasp! – plants, and social mingling between senior and junior staff. But this was too daring. The layout was deemed random, so ‘action furniture’ was developed to address privacy concerns. Unfortunately, by the 1980s, this deteriorated into cubicle farms. The open-plan offices that most of us worked in during the 2000s might have been a response to that… but they didn’t really work either. Distracting and noisy, many reported feeling exposed and self-conscious. Research shows that one third of our entire lives will be spent at work. There’s got to be a better way to do it.

Tobias, co-founder of a co-working space in Finsbury Park, is part of a new movement with a refreshingly positive mindset, ‘I’ve been running a commercial cleaning business, and I love offices! I know that sounds like a silly thing to love, but I do. They’re some of the most vibrant parts of London. I’ve seen incredible ones with butlers, restaurants, saunas… I wanted to create a place that takes the best parts and fits them into the world we’re living in now.’