Ode to an office

The death of the office is upon us; at least, according to umpteen blog posts doing the rounds on LinkedIn and other sources of profound wisdom.

Certainly COVID-19 has meant an unlikely cohort of mainstream companies has discovered the joys of remote working. And for many workers, the experience must have been revolutionary. 

The underlying truth.

Offices are a pain in the lower back for many who use them, being miles from their homes and typically involving cross-town commutes that make them wet/cold/miserable in winter and wet/hot/miserable in summer (the same goes for clients, who would much rather chat on Zoom than schlep to the wrong side of a major capital city and go through the existential agony of expensing an Uber). Putting on respectable clothes to meet with your colleagues is far less comfortable than lounging in a poker shirt in your home office atop a plush gaming chair, flicking between AlphaDesk and Youtube and nipping down to the fridge to investigate the results of a spectacular online shop.

But really, the reason that companies up and down the land (and right across the world) are so captivated by remote working is that offices are so painfully expensive. This is the underlying truth that’s driving the apparent demise of the office in our somewhat grey, post-COVID world.

But is everything as it seems? Is the office actually dead? Can we really work (and live) without it? We don’t have definitive answers to these questions – but we do have strong opinions.

Goodbye sweet Camden.

Like many other companies, we’ve terminated the lease on our office. We were paying thousands of pounds a month for a space we couldn’t use due to government mandated COVID restrictions, with zero visibility as to how things might play out. We’re a startup, we pride ourselves on keeping costs to a minimum, so there was really no choice in the matter. With lockdown in the UK still going strong (despite comically crowded beaches and throngs of masked up Generation Z’ers piling into Primark), we’re working from home and rolling with the situation as best we can. Like many companies, we’re finding that doing this CS remotely has actually accelerated things.

We loved our office in Camden, although we suspect that many of you who visited us regularly will be glad to see the back of it. Because it was off the beaten track, it was cheap. And because it was cheap, it enabled us to invest in key areas of our business, like building our online private deals network, getting our fund up and running (never cheap), and launching our trading platform. The local neighbourhood was vibrant – perhaps too vibrant at times, with serious crimes occurring only a stone’s throw away. 

But the thing we loved most about 5-6 Underhill Street was that it was different. It didn’t feel like the HQ of a hedge fund, or even a fintech business. It felt more like a gaming studio, or even an art gallery. The appeal of the place was hard to describe but oh so easy to experience. It rubbed off on people who came to see us. They entered with slightly sceptical grimaces, and left with big smiles on their faces. 

Like so many things, COVID-19 has accelerated something that was already in motion. Our business is maturing, and we need a more robust and credible HQ for this next phase of our journey. For one thing, allocators need to know that our infrastructure is robust. And it helps to make it easy for partners to visit us, to be part of the tried and tested routes around town that clients are so familiar with. We may be different to a lot of funds, but we still want to make it easy for investors to say yes to us. 

When the world stabilises and we settle down once again, we’ll probably rent an office with posh magazines and fresh fruit in the lobby. But we won’t splurge. And gosh, we’ll miss our attic space in north London, our little slice of creative chaos!

The memories might not be glamorous, but they are so meaningful to us: playing cricket in the gangway between our desks (and taking it way too seriously); drinking Red Stripe in the kitchen before our incredibly messy Christmas party; braving the (frankly terrifying) alleyway that connected our building to Camden High Street in order to go for a cheap and cheerful kebab at Woody Grill; dodging life-endangering scaffolding whilst sheepishly leading clients up from reception; playing music at an uncomfortable volume without complaint from our co-tenants, who were busy doing exactly the same thing. 

Days of empire.

All that is over. But it’s comforting to know that this has happened before. Indeed, the story of the office’s journey through history is surprisingly fascinating, with more ups and downs than a Championship play-off in an empty stadium with VAR on the blink. 

As far back as ancient Rome, the Tabularium was used to house public records and also may have served as an office building for workers. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the concept of the office disappeared from view for hundreds of years. Then, like now, people worked from home, with many shop owners living above their stores and employing clerks to do their accounts, paperwork and daily domestic tasks in an extreme (but nonetheless convenient) version of coworking.

Later, in the 1600s, the office staged a comeback. Lawyers, civil servants, and other professional service workers started operating out of offices in London, Amsterdam, and Paris. It’s widely believed that the first purpose built offices to spring up since the days of the Tabularium was the Old Admiralty Building in London, constructed in 1726 to store paperwork for the Royal Navy. The East India Company soon built its own headquarters, and the trend caught on.

The wasteland.

The dawn of the 20th Century saw the genesis of the open plan office that could come to dominate office culture for the next 100 years. With the opening of the Larkin Administration Building in New York in 1906, pioneering architect Frank Lloyd Wright created an office like an open plan factory. By all accounts, it wasn’t a great place to work, with employees sitting at seemingly endless rows of desks under fluorescent flights, with beady-eyed managers keeping tabs on them from strategically positioned private offices. It sounds eerily familiar to the trading floors where some of our team started their careers. 

Decades later, the Bürolandschaft (“office landscape”) design movement took root with the aim of democratising the workplace and stimulating more interaction between colleagues. Despite good intentions, the results were not always relished by workers. Robert Propst, president of Herman Miller Research Corporation, characterised the landscape:

“Today’s office is a wasteland. It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.”

In the ensuing decades there was a backlash against the open plan office’s lack of privacy, leading to the cubicle “farms” depicted in many a dystopian late-Capitalist blockbuster. This led Propst to observe:

“Not all organizations are intelligent and progressive. Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them.”

It seems he was a hard man to please, although, to be fair, so is the average worker. It strikes us that we actually ended up with a nice balance – since the early 21st Century most forward-thinking companies have created offices that combine open plan architecture with break out spaces where people can get some privacy and truly focus (or plan their weddings).

Finally, the co-working space arrived on the scene as a byproduct of the gig economy, a way of making offices affordable for freelancers and startups who want to limit their risk and PAYG. Despite all the stick they get lumped with (not helped by the WeWork debacle), they serve an important role in the modern economy. And they offer free beer. Some Big Tech companies (Google and its Googleplex) have subsequently tried to push a new vision of the office, once that integrates effortlessly with our lives, but this is simply unrealistic for most employers (not to mention undesirable for most employees).

The prevailing view.

The discourse around the future of the office has been somewhat simplified. The prevailing view amongst futurologists (that tag alone should make you run a mile) seems to be that we’re moving to a model whereby people will work from home and attend the odd, infrequent meet up with colleagues to “touch base” or whatever. People want to spend more time at home, and that is a given now that Coronavirus has shown managers that WFH can sustain productivity whilst slashing fixed costs. That’s the narrative, anyway.

We don’t buy that. The office is a way of life for millions of people. The same is true about so many fields of human experience – the way we do business, politics, financial services, sports, life, all revolve around the congregation of people. A few months of social distancing isn't going to change that.

The office is dead – for those who used it wrongly in the first place. For those who did it right, it’s more important than ever. We hope that Three Body Capital falls into the latter category. We never abused our office. We saw it for what it was – a place to work, to have fun, to live. Not to do facetime or imitate other companies. We never resented our commutes, because they brought us closer to where we wanted to go. 

We really appreciate you taking the time to hear us reminisce about a tired but soulful office building on the wrong side of the tracks. We look forward to welcoming you to our new office sometime in the not-so-distant future – whenever, and wherever, that is.