I have worked blissfully alone for 25 years. But this winter, my small tumbledown work flat in Paris — my safe space away from the wife and kids — finally had to be renovated. Since January I’ve been paying €358.80 a month to rent a desk in a WeWork co-working space. It has been a one-man experiment to settle one of the debates of our time: remote work versus the shared office. My conclusion: modern offices are terrible places to get anything done.
I resigned from the FT’s staff in 1998, mostly because I detested the office. The Financial Times at the time was headquartered in a large, horrible, cuboid building on Southwark Bridge in London, an overlit glass box where the windows didn’t open. I’d sit there in my monkey suit and tie, spasmodically working, but interrupted every few minutes by colleagues stopping by to moan about the boss or Chelsea FC.
Right now, I may be one of the final people ever to work in a WeWork. The company, co-founded by disastrously charismatic wannabe guru Adam Neumann, appears to be nearing the end of its long, strange trip. Its valuation has dropped by almost 99 per cent in four years, from $47bn to $503mn, and it’s busy restructuring its debts. However, WeWork did start from a genuine insight into how to improve offices: model them on coffee shops. The ur-version of WeWork, Green Desk, sprang up in 2008 in trendsetting Brooklyn, which at the time was filling with coffee shops bathed in natural light, inhabited by people wearing whatever they liked.