Eva Wiseman, Rowan Moore, Jay Rayner, Susie Orbach and Zoe Wood
I’ve read and thought more about office life over the last two years than I have at any time over the previous two decades when I worked in one. I say worked, but of course from this distance I can see that what I called office work might not quite stand up in a court of law, being comprised of equal amounts gossip, tea-runs and shouting passive aggressively at computers, alongside the clattery typing I am paid for.
There was a moment, in those early pandemic days, the days of shock and clapping, before the felt-tip rainbows in our windows faded to a ghostly grey, when the closure of offices felt like an opportunity. The future of work might find efficiency in compassion – it might not be focused on cities or require five-day weeks, or offices with dubious rat control. For many of us, once we had cleared a decent space at the kitchen table and evacuated our children, working from home for the first time in our lives was a revelation. Yet every day brought another small hurdle, a step forward in our psychosocial development.
Zoom meetings required a new kind of listening, along with the daily shock of our large, lined face at rest. The fashions we’d cultivated were now obsolete. Bras and heels and other such fripperies seemed suddenly absolutely ridiculous, and Zoom style (bold accessories and jazzy jumpers) took hold. We learned how to translate the nuanced opacity of a colleague’s Gchat in under three hours.
Fellow citizens
Once we’d clarified that our bosses were human, and not of the Pimlico Plumbers founder’s mould (“The virus has turned millions into selfish, cowardly liars who don’t give a damn about their fellow citizens so long as they can hide away at home while continuing to get paid,” he said in 2020) we felt confident enough to fold our days into new shapes that allowed such luxuries as a mid-afternoon dentist appointment. And still, still we did our work. Better, some say. Faster, without the grim commute or distraction of eight other people’s failing relationships, or emails about toilets and printers and “please refrain from leaving plates in the sink”, or the exhausting knowledge that at any moment the person you fancy from the post room might appear and you’ll have to look up, glittering and fabulous.
Though England has ended its work-from-home guidance, this time, surely, for good, we won’t forget what we learned, the new ways of communicating, the particular realisations about our own mangled productivity, the importance of switching off when the work day ends. But nor will we forget what we missed about office culture, and what we appreciate afresh – the thrill of really good gossip, the unlikely community there, the change that happens when you leave the house. As many British office spaces remain vacant, it is projected that one in 10 will no longer be required by 2027, which suggests that while the grand work revolution is yet to emerge, a smaller shift, allowing a flake of flexibility, has taken place. One that has unearthed, among the coffee cups and charger cables, some dusty humanity.
One of the most enduring and intractable problems of British society is housing. There aren’t enough homes in the places where – for economic and sometimes social reasons – there is the greatest demand. This means London and some other big cities such as Bristol, Manchester and Edinburgh, Cambridge and Oxford, the south-east. Decades of attempts to build more homes in and around these hotspots repeatedly founder on local opposition (some of it reasonable, some of it not) to development. Too little gets built, and at too high a price.
Attractive prospect
Working from home offers the attractive prospect of at least partly addressing this problem without laying a brick. If you only have to go into your office three days a week, it’s tolerable to live further away, in less overheated parts of the country, where the use of existing housing stock is slacker. A house, a garden – things which should not be unattainable dreams – might become affordable to those previously excluded from them. If you can’t bring more affordable houses to where people are, in other words, perhaps people can choose places where affordable houses are.
Other benefits would follow. People working from home might contribute more to their local economies and their famously suffering high streets by spending the money that they would otherwise be handing over to a big city Pret a Manger. They might have the time and mental space to be active members of local communities. It can only be a good thing if daily mass commutes become less intense. There would be environmental advantages to putting existing buildings to good use rather than building new homes.
There are also drawbacks to this redistribution of human and financial energy. It can simply mean gentrification on a national scale. One of the less happy effects of the pandemic has been the pressure on notable beauty spots in places like Cornwall and Wales, as well-off buyers seek rural idylls for their remote working, further squeezing locals out of the housing market.
Housing issues
There are plenty of jobs that can never be done remotely, often poorly paid, and relocation to less-expensive parts of the country is no kind of solution to the housing issues of those who do them.
But there has never been any one solution to something as big, complex and multi-faceted as the housing crisis. What is the case is that there are many parts of the country where two- and three-storeyterraced houses can cost a tenth of what otherwise identical homes sell for in London. The disparity presents opportunities that shouldn’t be lost in thestrange urge to rush back to five-day-a-week commuting.
In Boris Johnson’s Peppa Pig speech last November, an event so much outshone by subsequent scandals that it seems to belong to another era, he hinted that people who partly work from home might be called twats, on the basis that they come into their offices only on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
Instead of throwing out cheap insults, he should salute them for their role in helping with one of the many problems his government is failing to solve.
- The Guardian