Are city offices really the best place to work? asks Robert Wringham

The Guardian reports that central London office workers currently spend 2.3 days a week in the workplace. The figure comes from a report that “warns against a wholesale switch to working from home”.

I’ve been hearing that some people work from home all the time now or that they visit the office once a week. The less fortunate are being forced back into the office full-time, so 2.3 days sounds like a correct average.

The “warns against a wholesale switch to working from home” part is pure conjecture though, and probably reveals the motivations behind this study. After all, anyone can “warn against” something imaginary. The study offers no evidence that working from home leads to a decline in productivity (nor, seemingly, was it designed to detect it). In fact, evidence so far suggests the opposite:

Several studies over [2021] show productivity while working remotely from home is better than working in an office setting. On average, those who work from home spend 10 minutes less a day being unproductive, work one more day a week, and are 47 per cent more productive.

As well as scientifically collected evidence, doesn’t it also defy belief that sleepy workers, direct from a morning commute, are likely to be productive? Especially in an environment of ringing telephones, fire drills, birthday parties, all the rest of it. How could city centre offices be more productive environments than our homes? As Orwell put it: “imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.”

Moreover, productivity is but one way to assess how well work is working. What about the quality of output? What about impact (positive or negative) on the natural world? What about contribution to human culture?

The name of the think tank behind the research is Centre for Cities: another hint at the motivation behind this report. According to their website, their mission is to “help the UK’s largest cities and towns realise their economic potential”, which is fine, but their vision of how to achieve this is of a certain mindset. Clearly, they want people to return to city centres and they want those people to be workers. They want to see people in office attire with wristwatches and Bluetooth earpieces criss-crossing glass-fronted streets and spending digital money at franchise sandwich shops. I guess that’s just some people’s aesthetic preference, but it’s not science and it’s not progressive.

Meanwhile, I visited Montreal last month, which has the distinct feeling of a thriving city. Their solution seems to be pedestrianisation and a rapid expansion of the cycle lane network.

I walked on many streets closed to cars, bustling with well-dressed people on personal missions. They were buying records, walking, meeting for arty chats, painting on little easels, learning to walk on stilts, kissing, doing yoga, quietly jamming with acoustic guitars, busking, cycling and smoking simultaneously, reading real books and magazines. I’m not exaggerating: I saw all of this in a single afternoon on Avenue Mont-Royal, currently closed to cars for the summer.

Having the imagination to get beyond “BUSINESS” is all it takes really, which is what seems to be lacking at the Centre for Cities. What I saw in Montreal is still economic activity but it’s also real human activity and inherently worthwhile. It doesn’t involve sweating in an office while your real creative projects and the people you love are on the other side of a cinderblock wall.

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