Saturday 10 June 2023

The Opener / Andrew Tuck

I left the office earlier than usual on Thursday as I had arranged to meet a Monocle reader who had come to the launch of Spain: The Monocle Handbook at Midori House. He had mentioned a property project that he had just taken on that sounded intriguing and I had invited myself to have a look. But before we nose around his building, a word about London.

Summer has been slow to arrive this year, with the mornings annoyingly fresh as cold air barrelled in from the North Sea. Finally, on Thursday, a switch was thrown and the sky was a polished, flawless blue. Every bar that I cycled past on the way to my property viewing was ringed with merry drinkers. On evenings like this, London is hard to beat: even the tourists seemed to be having fun, as though they had forgotten just how much they were being charged for their hotel rooms. Which is good because when I see a family of visitors looking forlorn in the London rain or about to enter a notoriously rubbish restaurant, I have to resist intervening: "Do you mind if I book lunch for you? This place will leave you feeling sad. Or do you want to come round for dinner at my house?" Now, even I realise that, rather than seeing it as a welcoming London gesture, they might call the police so usually I keep my mouth shut. (My interventionist urges are especially strong when the lost souls are Spanish or Italian and you know that those kids wrapped in cagoules could be playing pelota on a sunny beach if only they had stayed home.)

But on Thursday, as I passed the British Museum, I saw packs of French teenagers waiting to board their coaches, laughing, jubilant, on a day that perhaps would be etched in their memories for years. That's the power of the sun in a city that is too used to being capped by clouds.

Then I met our reader. He has taken on a 1906 building that has stood empty for years and is creating new offices here. Yes, he is making his money from offices. He had the keys to the site so we walked across the lobby's terrazzo floors, worn smooth by generations of workers since Edwardian times, then up the old marble staircase. Sadly, though, much of the building was savagely butchered at some point in its history. A lone fireplace remains but apart from two small slabs, its green marble surround has been stripped and scrapped.

What I wanted to know was why he was betting on offices – and why here, right in the centre of the West End. There is, he explained, a shift under way. Many landlords and developers sought for years to seduce affluent technology start-ups with offices and co-working spaces in hipper neighbourhoods such as Shoreditch. Today, however, those businesses are struggling as funding has faded. So now he is tenant agnostic ("I am after creative people but not a single type of company") and is seeing an increased demand for places in central London – as near as possible to those end-of-the-day pubs and busy streets. "What has changed is that people who have a 20-person company now take a 10-desk office because they can stagger when people come in and the contracts that we offer are more flexible than in the past," he said.

The world of work continues to evolve in London and nobody knows where it will end. As one developer goes flexi and agnostic, someone else I met this week is involved in transforming an epic building in central London into a "science park". Since the pandemic began, medicine and health technology have flourished and the cool kids who work in the sector no longer want to toil in a factory-like research centre in the middle of nowhere. They want to be in cities, near the best science universities and close to urban life when their day ends (even clever people like a negroni). My lunch date – we went for sandwiches at the magical Paul Rothe & Son in Marylebone – is tasked with making sure that the building is a lure, has a sense of community and is fun. And I don't mean fun of the ping-pong-table variety but a place where people will be able to convene, talk and break bread.

According to the forecast for London, it's going to remain sunny. Judging by the dispositions of some people who I met this week, I think that might extend beyond what the meteorologists are predicting.