Real Biscuits and the History of the Office

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski

The BBC News website featured an article recently about the future of the office. Views expressed range from those who "can't wait to get around a real meeting table with real people round it and a real plate of biscuits on it" to others predicting the death of the office: "the game is up for the office as we know it " suggests Bruce Daisley, who is the author of The Joy of Work. "I was chatting to someone who works at a major media outlet last week, and he said we used to have 1,400 people coming into this office every day. For the last eight weeks we've had 30 people and the product hasn't changed. He said anyone who thinks things are going to go back to the way things were is bananas."

Then I clicked another link, fell down a rabbit hole and found myself reading about the history of the office. But what is an office? The article asks. One way to think about it is that it's wherever the admin gets done. That means a skyscraper counts, and so - at a pinch - does a Blackberry. It turns out that a few hundred years ago most of the admin got done at some sort of home office until larger companies like the East India Company started to generate so much paperwork that they needed purpose built offices.

Both articles suggested that the main perk of working from home is the lack of commute with the main drawback being the inability to escape. If only there was somewhere to work from really close to home that offered all of the benefits of an office and few of the...oh, wait

Ed