Cyndi Himmelstiere on the co-working ecosystem and the freelance-adjacent professional who has made Shoreditch their office for the past decade
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The Shoreditch Co-Worker: A Species Study
Seven years of working in and around the co-working spaces of Shoreditch has produced an informal taxonomy of the people who occupy them, which I have been developing in my head and will now attempt to commit to writing. The co-working population of Shoreditch is not a homogeneous group. It contains: the freelancer who needs a space with wifi and the social presence of other human beings to prevent the specific madness of working alone in a flat; the startup founder at the pre-office stage whose company has two and a half employees and a Notion board; the employed person whose employer has allowed remote work and who has decided that Shoreditch is a more interesting place to be remote than their home in Lewisham; the consultant who bills at rates that make the monthly co-working membership a trivial expense; and the person who is not entirely sure what they are doing but who needs to be somewhere that feels like work is happening.
The species that interests me most is the one I cannot categorize cleanly: the person who has been a freelancer for eight years and has achieved a level of financial stability and professional identity that is neither the precarity of early freelancing nor the security of employment, and who lives in a permanent relationship with uncertainty that they have become so habituated to that they no longer experience it as uncertainty. This person is common in Shoreditch. I see them in the same co-working spaces across years. Their projects change. Their fundamental situation does not change.
What the Ecosystem Requires
The co-working ecosystem requires a population with sufficient income to pay monthly memberships, sufficient flexibility to choose their location, and sufficient preference for community over isolation to choose a shared space over their home. This is a specific demographic and it is disproportionately concentrated in Shoreditch because Shoreditch has the density of creative and tech industry that produces it. The business models that sustain creative workers are varied; managing a career without institutional structure requires the self-organization that the co-working space’s presence facilitates. The desks are full. The coffee is good. The species continues.
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