Inside London's

There is a type of building in London that has become, over the past decade, as ubiquitous and as instantly recognisable as a pub or a post office. You know it when you see it. It has large windows. It has exposed brick. It has plants — not small, decorative plants, but large, ambitious plants, the kind of plants that suggest the building's occupants care deeply about nature while simultaneously spending their entire day staring at a screen. It has a reception desk staffed by a person who is unfailingly friendly in a way that feels slightly rehearsed, like a flight attendant on a very short flight. And it has, printed somewhere on its signage or its website or its Instagram page, a word that has become one of the most loaded terms in the modern lexicon: "community."

It is a coworking space. And London has approximately 900 of them.

The London Prat has spent two months investigating London's coworking industry — visiting 30 spaces, interviewing 60 workers, and sitting in more uncomfortable chairs than any human being should reasonably be expected to sit in. What we found was a phenomenon so thoroughly saturated with the language of connection, collaboration, and community that it took us several weeks to work out that, beneath all the language, very little of any of those things was actually happening. People were sitting in rooms. They were on their laptops. They were, occasionally, talking to each other. But mostly they were alone, in public, pretending that being alone in public was somehow better than being alone in private, and paying between £200 and £600 a month for the privilege.

What Is a Coworking Space, Actually?

A coworking space is, in its simplest form, an office that you rent by the desk rather than by the room. This is not, on its face, a revolutionary concept. People have been sharing office space for as long as offices have existed. What is revolutionary — or at least, what is new — is the way in which coworking spaces have been marketed, designed, and experienced. They are not presented as offices. They are presented as something closer to a lifestyle. A tribe. A movement. The websites of London's major coworking spaces are filled with words like "inspire," "collaborate," "innovate," and "synergise," arranged in sentences that mean nothing but sound, on first reading, as though they might mean something. "We are a community of visionary individuals, united by a shared passion for creating the future." This sentence, taken from the website of a coworking space in Shoreditch, contains eleven words that could individually be considered meaningful and zero sentences that, taken as a whole, communicate a single coherent idea.

Sandra Blackwood read this sentence aloud at an editorial meeting and said: "This is what happens when marketing departments are allowed to write. They produce language that sounds impressive and means nothing. It's the verbal equivalent of a very attractive empty box."

The Tour

Every coworking space in London offers a tour. The tour is not optional. It is, in fact, the primary sales tool — the moment at which the space attempts to convince you that it is not merely an office but an experience, not merely a desk but a destination. Theodore Bumble took 15 tours over the course of two months, and the experience was, each time, almost identical.

The tour begins at the reception desk, where a young person in a t-shirt that says something like "BUILD SOMETHING AMAZING" welcomes you with the sort of enthusiasm that suggests they have either just had an espresso or have been trained to simulate having just had an espresso. They then lead you through the space, pointing out features as though they were showing you a palace rather than a room with desks in it. "This is our hot-desking area," they say, gesturing at a row of identical desks with identical monitors. "This is where the magic happens." No magic has ever happened here. This is where people check their email and occasionally have a video call in which they say "Can you hear me? I think I'm on mute" approximately four times.

They then show you the kitchen. The kitchen is always a point of pride. It contains a coffee machine that is either very good or very expensive or both, a selection of teas that includes at least one type of tea that no one has ever heard of, and a bowl of fruit that is replenished daily and that no one ever eats, because the fruit is not the point. The point is that the fruit is there. The point is that someone, somewhere, has thought about your wellbeing enough to put an apple on a counter. This is what passes, in the coworking world, for community.

Finally, they show you the "collaboration space" or the "breakout area" or the "innovation pod" — the names vary, but the concept is always the same: a slightly smaller room with slightly more comfortable chairs, designed for the purpose of having conversations that cannot be had at a desk. In practice, these rooms are used almost exclusively for video calls that people do not want their desk neighbours to overhear, which is to say they are used for privacy, which is the exact opposite of collaboration.

The People Inside

The London Prat spent a week inside a coworking space in Clerkenwell, observing. We did not announce ourselves. We simply sat at a hot desk, with a laptop, and watched. What we saw was instructive.

At 9am, the space was empty. By 9:30, it had begun to fill. The people who arrived first were, without exception, the ones who looked as though they had been there before — they knew where the good chairs were, they knew which monitors worked and which didn't, and they moved through the space with the quiet confidence of people who have made peace with their surroundings. They sat down. They opened their laptops. They began to work. They did not speak to anyone.

By 10am, the space was full. The newcomers arrived — people on their first day, or their first week, looking around with the hopeful, slightly nervous expression of someone at a party who doesn't know anyone. They sat down. They looked at the people around them, clearly hoping that someone would say hello, that someone would initiate the "community" that the website had promised. No one did. Everyone was on their laptop. Everyone was working. Or, more precisely, everyone was performing the act of working, which in a coworking space is a subtly different thing from actually working, because in a coworking space you are always, on some level, aware that you are being seen working, and this awareness changes the nature of the work itself.

By 11am, the first person had a video call. They whispered into their microphone, as though they were in a library, or a church, or any other space in which silence is expected but not quite enforced. The person at the next desk glanced over, then looked away. By noon, three people were on video calls simultaneously, each one whispering, each one slightly irritated by the others' whispering, each one pretending that the others did not exist.

The Myth of Spontaneous Collaboration

The central promise of coworking — the thing that justifies its existence and its price — is spontaneous collaboration. The idea is that by placing different people, working on different projects, in the same room, you create the conditions for unexpected connections, brilliant conversations, and the sort of serendipitous encounters that, in tech industry mythology, led to the creation of companies worth billions. Steve Jobs designed Apple's offices to encourage chance meetings. The coworking industry took this idea and scaled it up, selling it as a feature to anyone willing to pay for a desk.

The London Prat tested this hypothesis. We placed a reporter — Barnaby Finch, who is, by temperament, the sort of person who does talk to strangers, mostly because he genuinely does not understand that most people find this unusual — in a coworking space for a full week, with instructions to initiate as many spontaneous conversations as possible and to report on what happened.

Barnaby's report was as follows. On Day One, he said hello to the person next to him. The person said hello back and then put on headphones. On Day Two, he complimented someone's laptop sticker. The person thanked him and moved to a different desk. On Day Three, he asked someone in the kitchen what they were working on. The person said "Oh, you know, just some stuff," in a tone that made it clear they did not wish to elaborate. On Day Four, he tried to start a conversation about the weather. The person he was talking to smiled politely, said "Yeah, crazy isn't it," and walked away. On Day Five, he gave up and spent the entire day reading about sea slugs.

"The spontaneous collaboration," Barnaby wrote in his report, "did not spontaneously occur. The people here are not unfriendly. They are simply busy. Or at least, they are performing busyness, which amounts to the same thing in terms of availability for conversation. The coworking space has not created community. It has created proximity. And proximity, it turns out, is not the same thing as community at all."

The Economics of Loneliness

The coworking industry in London is worth, by various estimates, somewhere in the region of £500 million a year. This is a significant amount of money, and it is being spent, in large part, by people who are lonely. This is not a criticism. Loneliness is an epidemic in London — a city of nine million people in which it is entirely possible to live for years without forming a single meaningful connection with anyone outside your immediate circle. The coworking space offers, at least in theory, a solution to this problem: a place to go, a reason to get dressed, a room full of other human beings who are, at least nominally, doing the same thing you are doing.

The tragedy is that it doesn't work. Or rather, it works only partially. It provides the appearance of community without the substance. It gives you a place to be, but not a reason to stay. It puts you in a room with other people, but it does not make those people your friends, or your colleagues, or anything other than strangers who happen to be sitting nearby. It is, in this sense, the loneliness equivalent of a room full of people watching television together — you are not alone, technically, but you are also not, in any meaningful way, together.

Miriam Toad, The London Prat's economics columnist, put it in her characteristically blunt way: "The coworking industry has monetised the desire to not be alone. This is, when you think about it, either the most human thing a business has ever done, or the most depressing. Possibly both. Definitely both."

The Price of a Desk

A hot desk in a London coworking space costs, on average, £350 a month. A private office — a small room with a door — costs between £800 and £2,500 a month, depending on the neighbourhood and the degree to which the space wishes to be taken seriously. For this money, you get: a desk, a chair, access to the kitchen (with its uneaten fruit), Wi-Fi, and the theoretical possibility of meeting someone interesting.

Derek Whitmore, who works from home and has done so for the entirety of The London Prat's existence, calculated that the money spent by London's coworking population could, if redirected, fund approximately 14,000 additional NHS nurses. He then ate a biscuit and said: "But the fruit bowl is nice, I suppose. If anyone ever ate from it." No one does. The fruit bowl remains full. The apples go soft. The community thrives, on paper. In practice, everyone is on their laptop, alone, in a room full of other people who are also alone, and nobody says a word.

Read more business and culture satire at prat.uk.