Cyndi Himmelstiere on the co-working aesthetic that unites a dozen companies with wildly different odds of surviving the year
I can walk into any of eleven co-working spaces within a fifteen minute radius of my flat and describe the interior before I open the door. Exposed brick, obviously. Reclaimed scaffold-board furniture. A neon sign with an inspirational word in a typeface that was fresh about eight years ago. A cold brew tap. What I cannot tell you, standing outside any of those doors, is which of the companies inside have eighteen months of runway left and which have considerably less, and that gap between the shared aesthetic and the wildly different underlying reality is what I’ve been trying to properly understand this month.
The Interior Design Stopped Meaning Anything Years Ago
There was a period, and people who were here for it will remember it fondly or with some embarrassment depending on temperament, when the exposed brick and the ping pong table genuinely signalled something: a certain kind of company, a certain kind of funding, a certain kind of ambition. That signal has completely decoupled from the substance it used to represent. The aesthetic is now simply what an office looks like when it’s furnished from the same three suppliers everyone else uses, regardless of whether the company behind the desk is thriving or three months from folding.
UK startup funding trends and survival rates by sector are tracked by Beauhurst, and broader small business survival statistics for the capital are published by the Office for National Statistics, whose figures on business closures in this specific type of premises tell a story the shared interior design gives absolutely no visual indication of.
I Spent a Week Trying to Guess and Got It Wrong Almost Every Time
As a slightly unscientific experiment, I visited six of these spaces over the course of a week and tried, before speaking to anyone, to guess from appearance alone which companies felt confident and which felt precarious. I was wrong more often than I was right. The company with the most polished branding and the tidiest desk turned out, when I finally spoke to the founder properly, to be six weeks from a decision about whether they could make payroll. The scrappiest looking desk in the building, papers everywhere, belonged to a founder who had just closed a funding round she seemed almost embarrassed to discuss in front of her visibly less fortunate neighbours.
This isn’t a criticism of anyone involved. It’s an observation about how thoroughly the visual language of this particular kind of workspace has become disconnected from any information it might once have carried, which strikes me as a genuinely interesting thing to have happened to an aesthetic that started out, in its earliest days around here, as an actual cost-saving measure rather than a costume.
The Co-Working Operators Have Their Own Precarious Math
What I hadn’t fully appreciated before this piece is that the co-working spaces themselves are running on margins nearly as thin as some of their tenants, having signed long leases at rents calculated during a period of much stronger demand and now filling desks at rates that, several operators told me off the record, barely cover the difference.
Commercial real estate analysis of flexible workspace operator finances is documented through research published by Instant Group, whose sector reports have tracked exactly this squeeze across the flexible workspace industry over recent years.
What I’ve Actually Learned From a Week of This
- The exposed brick tells you nothing anymore. It’s simply the default, the way beige carpet used to be the default in an older generation of office.
- Founders are, without much exception, considerably better at masking financial stress in a communal workspace than you’d expect, largely because everyone around them is doing the same thing.
- The genuine tell isn’t the desk. It’s who’s still there at seven in the evening on a Tuesday, and for what reason.
- The co-working operators themselves are quietly one of the more fragile parts of this entire ecosystem, and almost nobody writes about them at all.
What I’ll Actually Remember From This
The founder with the tidy desk and the six weeks of runway ended up, by the time I filed this, securing a small bridge round that bought her team another two quarters. I don’t know if that’s a happy ending or just a postponement, and neither, I think, does she. That uncertainty, more than any interior design choice, is the actual defining feature of this stretch of the neighbourhood right now.
More from me at everything I’ve filed for The London Prat so far. For a related look at how visible confidence and underlying substance can diverge, see this piece on an unchanged rate reissued with fresh conviction days after it was first announced.
I asked the second founder in that same building whether she agreed, and she said, half laughing, that the aesthetic had become such a fixed default that she’d actually briefed her own fit-out contractor to avoid exposed brick specifically, on the theory that visible plaster was now, perversely, the more distinctive choice.
The listing decision also has a curious parallel in this coverage of a sector receiving another promised historic reform of a kind it had already been promised historically, a similar case of formal recognition arriving without much consultation of the people actually doing the underlying work.
Further reading at further pieces from across the wider UK desk, and the humour desk at Bohiney Magazine.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
