At this juncture, the jury is still out on the future of wfh, or working from home for those unfamiliar with the acronym, now repurposed for the Covid era. As we ease from lockdown and learn to live with the continued presence of Covid19, we are all reassessing our worklife. While a number of large high-profile employers have given their employees the option, or in some cases encouraged wfh for the long term – these include Facebook, Google, Twitter, RBS – many are continually feeling their way as each week passes.
Will we continue to wfh? All the time? Some of the time? Three days a week? Or are some of us so keen to go into an office we will happily don our FCs (face coverings) and commute to commune with our coworkers in a socially distanced way?
Whatever our personal preference, what emerges in working patterns over the next year will in part be dictated by how companies change their use of office space. Some are actively moving to models where the “office” becomes a place for occasional meetings rather than continual working, while others are adapting to socially distanced models of working within new office layouts. The key will be flexibility, which means we will need to be able to wfh, even if we don’t want to do it every day.
Which leads us to the redevelopment of the Mortlake Brewery. Is the current design, now awaiting consultation from the Mayor of London, fit for purpose in these changed times? If each and every new resident on the site had to wfh, would the redevelopment accommodate this in a safe and viable way? Back in January when the planning applications were decided by LBRUT, none of us had any idea that wfh would become an established way of life. How times change.
Aside from the design of the housing units and public spaces, how will the local infrastructure accommodate hundreds of WFHers? Does the redevelopment support access to the river and open space for many people on a daily basis? How will transport needs change? Will local cafes and restaurants thrive? How do we achieve a sense of space and community in this new world?
These are all questions to be addressed in the Mayor’s consultation later this year, and I encourage all Mortlakers to think about the redevelopment plans in a world where we all wfh.
Clare Delmar