#9 🏡 An electronic cottage in England

This edition was written at the Deep Work Club at Hanbury Hall, before receiving it’s final edit at Ashore Pop-Up Coworking #1.

Named after Cal Newport’s book of the same name, the concept of deep work is using your brain like a Swiss army knife vs Yanagiba Blue Steel - skimming across many different tasks, or setting aside time for focusing on one piece of truly great work with no distractions. (Hanbury Hall confiscated my phone at the start of the Deep Work club to ensure this happened; a frightening moment.)

At Ashore, our spaces are set up for multi-day deep work and recharge retreats, so the shorter version on offer at Hanbury Hall is a good way to get a weekly dose of it without having to completely remove yourself to somewhere new.

As I discussed in the last edition of Far Out, this concept has existed for centuries - Bill Gates, Led Zeppelin and Mary Shelley are but a few examples of great artists and entrepreneurs who have used the power of a new place to unlock amazing work.

Ashore is a cabin in the woods updated for modern work; the electronic cottage. Deep work club à une (or deux). The Hanbury Hall team wrote an excellent blog about how our mission lines up with theirs: “How surfing changed my work day”. Increased flexibility is changing how people think about work, and how it fits into their lives.

Per fellow Toffler-appreciator and entrepreneur Albert Hill from The Modern House no.2:

Whilst tech lets far-flung friends into your home, for instance, it also lets in less desirable forces…

All the time spent at home pawing or gawping at screens has left our hands and eyes crying out for alternative, richer, experiences.

The screen’s very flatness, its lack of tactility, has driven us to seek more texture and vitality in our interiors.

We all know about the proliferation of indoor plants, we are seeing tapestries increasingly hung where prints used to be and imperfect natural finishes (such as clay plaster) are taking over more and more walls.         

This is why I so like the ‘cottage’ part of Toffler’s prophetic phrase.

It acknowledges our desire to, on the one hand, look forward but, on the other, look back to something far familiar, far more elemental (like greenery, rough walls and fabrics).

At Ashore, we’ve ended up plugging in - with our standardised high-spec work setups - but wrapping the rest of the experience in the elemental - picking locations exclusively in beautiful natural environments.

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A new example of the thinking retreat idea came out last month - Simon Kuper in the FT; ‘How I Made My Perfect Office’. Being based in the middle of Paris, it’s like Bizarroworld Electronic Cottage.

There was a small amount of the usual snark:

Yes, Kuper’s setup is out of reach for the majority, especially in an urban centre. He admits that his ability to have a separate work flat was a quirk of history in some ways - in the early 2000s, the price of real estate in Paris was low compared to similar properties in other major European cities, so despite having no connection to France at the time, he took a punt and bought it originally to live in.

Space is now at a premium; the global population in 2001 was 6.2 billion, and today it has crept just over 8 billion; Paris has grown steadily in that time from 9 million to over 11 million citoyens within the bounds of the Périph.

The price of real estate has caused a demographic squeeze as well as a simple space squeeze.

The prospect of the childless city by Emma Jacobs (also in the FT the same week) examines how large international cities - London, New York, Paris, Dubai - are playgrounds for the rich and single, and becoming increasingly childless.

In London, there will be around 237 less reception classes of pupils (or around 7.6% less children in total entering London’s school system) by 2026 vs today - yes, in just three years. It’s astonishing how fast this demographic decline is happening, but also easy to see why.

As a resident of Deep London (Zone 1), it’s becoming easier to get out of the city - and therefore, get in to the city if you don’t live here - via investment in public initiatives like the Elizabeth Line, which has connected up the far East of Essex to the far West of Slough, Maidenhead and Reading.

This, plus the increased working flexibility the professional class enjoys - with the main breadwinner in a house perhaps expected to be in a central London office only 1-2 days a week, if at all - it’s far easier to treat London as purely ‘the entertainment machine’ and to spend most of your time outside it, even for the ambitious and high-flying.

It is no surprise that as a result, families are leaving for the numerous new build housing estates popping up all over the ‘Greater London’ suburban sprawl. For those working in a fully flexible environment, who are not tied to make the long journey to the centre 1-2 days a week, they can work and live wherever they want, but for the rest of us there’s still a lot of green and pleasant land in the commuter belt.

I wonder what all this means for the UK city (not just London, but Bristol, Manchester and Birmingham too), and that city creature, the modern office.

I spent over half my pre-Ashore working life in various WeWorks in central London with different tech startups, so this week’s news that WeWork may cease to be a going concern felt big.

If all the above trends are right - more and more people working remotely, more and more people leaving city centres to work and live in their own electronic cottages, and the people who commute only doing so for 1 or 2 days a week - then there’ll be no big “return to the office” as American VCs would have you believe.

Some worry that remote-first working practices will atomise working life, especially for the young. If people do not attend a central London office, “how will they socialise? How will they learn?”. But there’s no community inherent in living in a flatshare with strangers. Going off to the big city has always been a lonely, expensive and atomising experience in itself.

The levelling up agenda of the UK government fits better with a different conception of working life for young people. As the paper itself opens with - “talent is spread equally across our country, but opportunity is not.” By spreading out opportunity, we can allow young people to work in the community in which they were raised. This is predicted to improve our stagnant productivity, and add billions to the UK economy. Project Gigabit, the Shared Rural Network deal, improvements in public transport - all of this won’t be best deployed if we still expect everyone to be able to make it in and out of central London every day to be considered to be “properly working”.

Part of Alvin Toffler’s thesis about the Third Wave of industrialisation taking place in some version of the electronic cottage was a critique of the second wave of the industrial revolution. That second wave, moving from artisans working at home to centralised production in factories were not environmentally or socio-economically sustainable, and in some ways a blip in the 10,000 years of human history.

More time and more space to work should mean unlocking more creative work and greater innovation, but there are many other second order effects we could unlock - multi-generational families living close to each other, for instance, makes the entire family unit more economically resilient, and usually means more children being born; there are also environmental benefits with less commuting and less intense land development in urban areas.

Toffler predicted many things that didn’t come to pass, but on this part, it seems his vision of the electronic cottage could be finally coming true.