The Post-Pandemic Remote Work Question Has Produced a Different Shoreditch Office Landscape Than Anyone Expected
From Bohiney and The London Prat.
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | DitchPitch.uk
What Was Predicted
After 2020, the Shoreditch tech and creative industry landscape was widely predicted to be transformed by remote work: the office spaces would empty, the coworking spaces would close, the lunch economy that depended on office workers would contract, and the neighbourhood would lose the daytime density that made it commercially viable for the venues that served that density. Some of this happened. The specific outcome is more nuanced than the prediction.
What Actually Happened
The specific outcome: large office spaces have been partially converted to mixed residential and office use. Coworking spaces have contracted but not disappeared; the ones that survived have done so by specialising rather than generalising, serving the specific communities — podcast studios, photography spaces, the creative industry specific collaborative environments — that remote work cannot replicate. The lunch economy has shifted: the busiest periods are Tuesday through Thursday rather than Monday through Friday, reflecting the hybrid work pattern that has become the default.
The Hybrid Effect
The hybrid work pattern has produced the specific Shoreditch weekday pattern of: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday being the days when the neighbourhood operates at its pre-pandemic office density, and Monday and Friday being the days when it operates at the quieter weekend-adjacent pace that remote-default working produces. This is not the office-full or office-empty binary that the post-pandemic prediction assumed. It is the middle state that most working arrangements have settled into.
The Commercial Consequence
The commercial consequence of the hybrid pattern is that Shoreditch’s venues have adapted to serving a concentrated Tuesday-Thursday demand rather than a distributed Monday-Friday demand. The coffee shops that are packed on Wednesdays are quieter on Fridays. The lunch spots that had ten-minute queues at 12:30 on Thursdays now have those queues on Tuesdays and Thursdays and not on the other days. The adaptation is real and ongoing. The neighbourhood continues to function. The function is different. Read The Daily Mash.
More: The Daily Mash.
Shoreditch continues. The streets are the same streets they were last week and they contain slightly different things than they contained last week, because the neighbourhood turns over at the specific rate of a place where the rent ensures turnover. The coffee shops that were here last year are mostly still here. The ones that were not here last year are beginning the process of becoming the ones that were here this year. The murals change faster than the buildings. The buildings change faster than the street layout. The street layout has not changed since the Huguenots. Everything else is in motion. The column continues because the neighbourhood continues, and the neighbourhood is worth writing about because it is genuinely interesting and genuinely complicated and will be both of those things regardless of whether anyone is writing about it, but the writing makes it more visible, and the visibility is the point.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
Shoreditch continues to be the place where things happen first and then happen elsewhere. The coffee shop format, the street art curation, the creative co-working ecosystem, the specific combination of proximity to the City and residual warehouse space that makes premium-rent bohemianism possible — all of these things emerged here and have since been replicated in Peckham, in Hackney, in every city in Britain that has an arts quarter and a Wetherspoons and a yield gap in its commercial property market. The replication does not diminish the original. It confirms that the original was doing something that other places wanted. The neighbourhood was right about itself. The neighbourhood continues. The journalism continues. The column continues next week at the same address. Shoreditch continues to be the place where things happen first and then happen elsewhere. The coffee shop format, the street art curation, the creative co-working ecosystem, the specific combination of proximity to the City and residual warehouse space that makes premium-rent bohemianism possible — all of these things emerged here and have since been replicated in Peckham, in Hackney, in every city in Britain that has an arts quarter and a Wetherspoons and a yield gap in its commercial property market. The replication does not diminish the original. It confirms that the original was doing something that other places wanted. The neighbourhood was right about itself. The neighbourhood continues. The journalism continues. The column continues next week at the same address. Shoreditch continues to be the place where things happen first and then happen elsewhere. The coffee shop format, the street art curation, the creative co-working ecosystem, the specific combination of proximity to the City and residual warehouse space that makes premium-rent bohemianism possible — all of these things emerged here and have since been replicated in Peckham, in Hackney, in every city in Britain that has an arts quarter and a Wetherspoons and a yield gap in its commercial property market. The replication does not diminish the original. It confirms that the original was doing something that other places wanted. The neighbourhood was right about itself. The neighbourhood continues. The journalism continues. The column continues next week at the same address. Shoreditch continues to be the place where things happen first and then happen elsewhere. The coffee shop format, the street art curation, the creative co-working ecosystem, the specific combination of proximity to the City and residual warehouse space that makes premium-rent bohemianism possible — all of these things emerged here and have since been replicated in Peckham, in Hackney, in every city in Britain that has an arts quarter and a Wetherspoons and a yield gap in its commercial property market. The replication does not diminish the original. It confirms that the original was doing something that other places wanted. The neighbourhood was right about itself. The neighbourhood continues. The journalism continues. The column continues next week at the same address.
