Koder runs Undeniable Studios, a music production conglomerate built from youth clubs, pirate radio, and 10,000 hours of free studio time in Brockley.

He's now the first Creative in Residence at Blue Garage in Lewisham, where he's installing a commercial music studio, planning his Circle the Ends tour, and bringing brand partnerships to local creatives.

The partnership model is simple: the coworking space provides infrastructure and network access. Koder brings cultural programming, creative energy, and a proven track record of "fostering local greatness."

This conversation unpacks how Koder built an independent music career without major label backing, what he learned from Miguel (co-founder of WeWork) about the tension between community and revenue, and why creative infrastructure in the neighbourhood matters for young people who can't afford to travel into town.

Bernie met Koder at Unreasonable Connection on 24th February. The conversation kept circling back to one theme: barriers to entry.

Who feels welcome in a coworking space? Who gets access to creative infrastructure? Who has to leave their neighbourhood to find the room, the equipment, and the people who believe in their work?

Koder's philosophy is stark: "You're never broke if you got ideas."

But ideas need space to develop. They need microphones, mixers, and rooms where you can close the door and record without your mum shouting upstairs. They need Uncle Dennis types—local mentors who teach you how to use a DAW without charging £500 for a course.

This episode is for operators who want to turn a corner of their space into a studio, a rehearsal room, or a cultural residency. It's for operators who know their neighbourhood has talent but don't know how to give that talent access.

Koder's built the model. He's willing to replicate it. The question is whether your space is ready to move from desk rental to creative infrastructure.

Timeline Highlights

01:43 – Koder introduces himself: "I'm known for my ability to put my memories and my experiences on record, make music essentially. And I'm also known for being a connector of people."

02:24 – The Undeniable ecosystem: started as Undeniable Records in 2017, expanded into Undeniable Studios, then Undeniable Films. "It's a conglomerate... the arm that I would say is the most active at the moment... is Undeniable Studios."

03:31 – Early career: youth clubs in the ends, building local buzz, girls playing his songs on old Nokias at the back of the bus. "It was before social media... sometimes I'll be travelling around Lewisham, people be playing my songs on bus, singing the words, and they didn't even know it was me."

04:56 – Learning in real time: "The reason I can say words like conglomerate... it's not because I've done a business course... I was taking risks... betting on myself... and I was coming across people that was like, actually, what you're doing should all sit under one thing called a conglomerate."

06:48 – Uncle Dennis's front-room studio in Brockley: "When he found out that I was into music, he taught me the basics of how to record myself and how to use a mixer... my journey of self-sufficiency kind of started with... my Uncle Dennis."

08:41 – What he was listening to at 14: Craig David, So Solid Crew, S Club 7, Wiley, early Dizzee Rascal. "I was a very UK garage or super pop kid... I didn't really have a hip-hop upbringing."

11:19 – At 20: started Indigo Child Records with his friend Age. Artists like Nadia Rose and Sam Tompkins came through that era. "We didn't understand the business of things, but we just knew how we wanted to feel and the flexibility we wanted."

14:52 – The guest list rule: "If you wanted a free ticket or you was on the guest list, the rule was you had to bring someone who'd never heard of Koder before."

16:42 – Missing the stage: "That's why this year I'm gonna hit the road again on my Circle the Ends tour... I miss being out there and touching the people and just feeling that energy of being on stage."

21:54 – What he learned from Miguel (WeWork co-founder): "The importance of community in a space... but the danger of what happens when things are very community-centric and revenue's prioritised... finding that balance is key."

28:10 – The philosophy: "Ideas are currency. You're never broke if you got ideas... the ability to back and bring an idea to life is a form of currency."

32:08 – Creatives in Residence at Blue Garage: "We're gonna put a music studio in Blue Garage... also planning the Circle the Ends tour in the space... the merch, the signage, and all of the physical products... will be made there."

34:58 – Fostering local greatness: "My drive and my commitment is for other coworking spaces that are forward-thinking... if I'm able to set up an Undeniable Studios in different coworking spaces, then they can also start to attract that creativity."

Lesson 1: Ideas Are Currency (But They Need a Room)

Koder's entire career is built on a single premise: ideas are currency, and you're never broke if you've got them.

But ideas aren't enough on their own. They need infrastructure.

When Koder was 10, he formed Hazard Crew with his cousins. They burned blank CDs, designed artwork, and shopped them around the family. They didn't know what "marketing" meant. They just knew they had something they wanted people to hear.

By 14, he was recording himself using his Uncle Dennis's front-room studio in Brockley. Uncle Dennis taught him how to use a mixer, a microphone, and a DAW (digital audio workstation). "My Uncle Dennis gave me them early skills and early lessons and took time out... he had a lot of patience... to teach me, not knowing what I was going to become today."

That patience matters. Uncle Dennis didn't charge him. Didn't gate-keep the equipment. Didn't require proof of commitment or potential. He just taught his nephew how to record.

By 20, Koder had started Indigo Child Records. By his mid-twenties, he was headlining Sickabit—one of the most important up-and-coming music showcases in London. People like Stormzy came through those early lineups.

None of this required a major label. It required rooms. Microphones. Mixers. Blank CDs. Uncle Dennis types.

Fast forward to now: Undeniable Studios gives away 10,000 hours of free studio time in Brockley. The space functions as a music studio, a coworking space, and delivery infrastructure for youth-related projects with brands like Universal.

Koder realised early on that different people see the same room differently. "I see this as a music studio, but a corporate brand... sees this as a space that they can deliver programmes. The person down the road... they do work on their laptop. They see it as a coworking space."

The room adapts to the user. That's the model.

For coworking operators, the lesson is this: creative infrastructure doesn't require massive capital investment. It requires one small room, some equipment, and a willingness to let people use it on their terms.

If Koder can give away 10,000 hours in Brockley and ...

— Parisa Wright

Parisa Wright runs Greener and Cleaner, a community sustainability charity that took over a vacant unit inside The Glades shopping centre in Bromley.

Five days a week, the Hub teaches residents how to mend clothes, reduce energy bills, grow food, and repair electronics—all whilst sitting opposite a McDonald’s and the public toilets.

The location is deliberate.

Parisa chose accessibility over purity, planting a “hope hub” in the middle of the retail rat race where people already are, not where activists think they should be.

The conversation centres on how coworking spaces can partner with community projects like Greener and Cleaner without running them.

You don’t need deep pockets or a dedicated sustainability manager. You can offer free desk passes, meeting room access, or signpost volunteering opportunities. In return, your members get training (carbon literacy, energy clinics), CSR pathways, and visible proof that their workspace invests in the local community.

Parisa also chairs the new Community Sustainability Support Network for England, launching in spring 2025.

It’s a free network for anyone running a community sustainability project—coworking hubs included. Members share templates, case studies, impact data, and collaborate on funding bids. If you’re running a repair café, a community fridge, or a lending library in your space, you can join.

The partnership model here is simple: local charities get breathing room (free workspace and promotional reach), and coworking operators can amplify their impact without taking on another full-time project.

Both sides win. The community wins twice.

Timeline Highlights

00:01:44 – Parisa introduces herself: founder of Greener and Cleaner, chair of the Community Sustainability Support Network for England (launching spring 2025).

00:03:22 – The Hub location: a prominent vacant unit in The Glades shopping centre, chosen specifically because it’s near McDonald’s, opposite public toilets, and accessible by public transport. “We specifically chose one that was near a McDonald’s... to be able to engage everyone.”

00:04:23 – What happens at the Hub: “People can learn how to mend things, how to repair things, how to grow food, how to insulate my home... It gives them an oasis of positivity, agency, community collaboration and connexion.”

00:06:16 – The knit, stitch, and crochet social: 30 people attend regularly, a mix of ages and languages. “Some people are going for their mental health, some people are going for loneliness... and they always have a community project on the go.”

00:07:06 – “It’s like a hope hub... because they’re like a ray of sunshine and people can feel like they’re not alone and that they can make a difference.”

00:09:14 – Why five days a week matters: “What there hasn’t been has been something that’s been 5 days a week and that is meeting all different areas of sustainability, but all different areas of community need as well.”

00:10:13 – The in-person advantage: “It’s very experiential. You can’t just do it online... come out of the misinformation... and actually come and have a conversation with someone.” Local issues like ULEZ become less divisive when discussed face-to-face at the Hub.

00:12:59 – The coworking partnership begins: “You can give [charities] membership for free or at a discounted rate... day passes... access to podcast studios, meeting rooms.”

00:13:58 – Community tech reuse: “A partner company... takes out the hard drives, returns them, and basically updates them... then we get them out to people who are digitally excluded... or schools.”

00:14:57 – Why coworking spaces benefit: “Contingent Works... can get the word out to its members... a visual reminder that our coworking space is investing into the community... and tells them about a cool activity or project they can get involved in.”

00:16:09 – Training at local rates: “A big corporate in London is like a grand and a half to two and a half grand... with a local coworking space... we are doing it to cover our costs.” Carbon literacy training, Climate Fresk workshops, lunch-and-learns—all priced for local partnerships, not London corporates.

00:17:14 – Volunteering pipelines: “Provide volunteering opportunities... in person locally... [and] remotely—designing a poster... marketing advice... helping create a video.” This gives coworking members CSR pathways without heavy infrastructure.

00:20:39 – The national network: “We are launching a network for the region of England... join the Community Sustainability Support Network for England for free... share our video case studies... templates... collaborate on funding bids... and have a bit more of a voice with government and with funders.”

00:29:21 – Library of Things funding: “We persuaded the council’s carbon management team to use the carbon reduction fund... [to fund] the Library of Things... brand new tools... trade quality... with regular and concession rates so people can borrow rather than buy new.”

Lesson 1: Accessibility Beats Purity

Greener and Cleaner didn’t open in a refurbished warehouse or a community garden tucked behind the railway arches. It opened in a shopping centre, near McDonald’s, opposite the public toilets.

That choice was strategic, not accidental.

Parisa explicitly wanted to intercept people where they already were—not where environmental activists thought they should be. The Glades gets footfall. It has lifts, toilets, changing stations, and public transport links. It’s where parents go with pushchairs, where elderly residents can get to without a car, and where teenagers hang out after school.

“We specifically chose one that was near a McDonald’s and opposite public toilets because for us... We wanted to be able to engage everyone.”

The location creates a jarring sensory contrast. Outside the Hub: bright retail lighting, the smell of fast food, aggressive visual merchandising designed to induce passive consumption. Inside the Hub: community sewing machines, returned power tools from the Library of Things, peer-to-peer conversations about energy poverty and ULEZ.

This pattern interrupt is the point.

If you bury your community project in an activist enclave, you only reach people who already agree with you. If you plant it in a mainstream commercial space, you intercept the accidental passerby—the person looking for the toilets, grabbing a coffee, killing time before a meeting.

Matt Golding (the guest from the previous episode) called it a “hope hub.” Bernie described walking past and seeing a table full of people knitting in the middle of the mall—shop, lights, shop, lights, oh, table with lots of people.

That’s the design working.

For coworking operators, the lesson is this: don’t wait for the perfect purpose-built space to start a community project. Use what you have. A corner table. A meeting room once a week. A partnership with someone who’s already doing the work across the road.

Accessibility beats purity every time.

Lesson 2: You Don’t Have to Run It—You Just Have to Connect to It

One of the most practical sections of this conversation is Parisa's explanation of how coworking spaces can partner with local charities without t...

The hero’s journey is broken.

That 2,000-year-old storytelling archetype—the one from ancient Greece, from Jason and the Argonauts, from Star Wars and Lord of the Rings—was built for a different kind of story. It’s individualistic, extractive, and violent. It works brilliantly for getting millions of people to watch Orcs die while Tom Cruise learns a personal lesson. But it doesn’t work for collective action.

Matt Golding has spent four years learning how to fix it.

He’s a filmmaker and the founder of Rubber Republic, a content studio he rebooted in 2019 to work exclusively on positive storytelling. Before that, he made viral campaigns—the kind that racked up millions of views and Cannes Lions awards. Comedy sketches shared across the early internet. He taught himself by doing it.

After two years working for environmental and social justice organisations, he realised they were all making the same mistake. They were telling people what not to do. What to cut down on. What to avoid. Framed around the problem, not the solution. And even when they tried to tell positive stories, people didn’t believe them.

The pushback wasn’t from ideological opponents. It came from people who agreed with the cause but fundamentally didn’t think community action could create meaningful change at scale.

So Matt created the Antidote Project.

It’s a framework for how to tell collective action stories in a way that makes people believe change is achievable. The podcast—Screw This, Let’s Try Something Else—demonstrates it in practice. Six episodes, made with Maryam Pasha and Immediate Media, each one showing how local communities are transforming the fundamentals of how we live: energy, food, housing, and decision-making.

The framework has two parts: the Filter (eight criteria for which stories to tell) and the Narrative Arc (eight steps for how to tell them).

It starts with a positive vision. It briefly acknowledges the problem. Then it shows how the idea can spread, how it’s already spreading, and how you can participate if you want. No pressure. No single call-to-action railroading you into clicking a link. Just agency.

The first episode of the podcast is about a working-class community on the outskirts of Bristol. They rewrote the entire housing policy for their area—it’s now illegal to build a home there with a gas boiler, without EV charging, or without top-notch insulation. Then they built the UK’s largest community-owned wind turbine and now make £100,000 a year from it.

That money doesn’t leave the neighbourhood. It stays in a regenerative economy. It shifts how rent, energy, and food bills flow. When money starts flowing differently, the whole game changes.

Bernie and Matt get into why “positive stories” don’t work (people think they’re nice but not scalable), why social media is toxic for this kind of storytelling (park it for now), and why global solutions are a lie we tell ourselves. Humans work best locally. Where we can see the effects. Where ingenuity comes out of community action because people can see what they need and come up with brilliant solutions.

This episode is a lesson, not an interview. It teaches the Antidote method so you can use it.

Timeline Highlights

[01:43] Matt on what he does: “I am learning how we change the way we tell stories around collective action to help us all believe we can change the world”

[02:07] The Antidote Project: “Exploring how we change the way we approach progressive and collective action storytelling... to make it feel invitational, exciting, and like something you want to join in with”

[03:55] On storytelling being hijacked: “The word storytelling has been abused... by overpaid people in marketing... The stories we tell shape the world that we inhabit... storytelling done badly has created the problems in the world”

[07:33] The podcast as demonstration: “We’ve made a podcast called, Screw This, Let’s Try Something Else, which aims to demonstrate how we could tell collective action stories in a different way”

[09:54] The hero’s journey problem: “We live in this very individualistic, very extractive, very violent culture... the hero’s journey... normalises theft, violence... That is okay because we’re on the side of these people”

[13:39] World-changing ideas hidden in humble stories: “Amazing ideas are embedded in a load of community action, but they’re almost quite mutedly, humbly shared... These are world-changing ideas, and we need to shout about them”

[14:51] The four universal needs: “The four things we identified are energy, food, housing, and decision-making. We tell all stories framed around those key framings”

[16:02] The three scaling steps: “Bring it down to an action you can take part in today... scale that up... and network it and mention the fact that this example... is not the only example... This is happening everywhere”

[17:33] Parking social media: “Social media... has toxic algorithms. It drives storytelling behaviours and habits that are not very helpful. So let’s park that one”

[19:51] Why positive stories failed initially: “A lot of the pushback we got... they just fundamentally didn’t believe that this stuff would ever create a scale of change that was meaningful”

[22:28] The Antidote goal: “How do you change the shape of storytelling to overcome that... and start to re-find that truth that together we can create big change?”

[26:00] Humble beginnings matter: “We don’t tell any stories from communities who exhibit elements of what others could perceive as privilege... Let’s tell those stories... to prove that you don’t need amazing, stupid expertise to do this stuff”

[29:09] Plural invitations: “We make sure that invitation is plural... We have to allow people agency in how they participate”

[31:51] The Bristol example: “In Bristol, the community... rewrote the entire housing policy for their area... then went on to build the biggest community-owned wind turbine in the country and make 100 grand a year from it”

[36:14] Why local works: “We’ve created a culture through globalisation that allows us to take more responsibility than we’re cognitively capable of... But how we do work really well is... with our communities around us, where we can see the effects”

The Problem: Traditional Storytelling Was Built for Extraction

Storytelling has been hijacked by marketing.

That’s the first thing to understand. The word itself has been co-opted by overpaid people in agencies to describe what they do when they’re really just selling stuff. Bernie describes it perfectly: the social media week events ten years ago, full of blokes in skinny jeans two sizes too tight and £400 black-framed glasses saying, “It’s all about the narrative. Storytelling is the transformation of seamless integration.” Meaningless jargon.

But the problem runs deeper than marketing. It’s in the structure itself.

The dominant storytelling archetype in Western culture is the hero’s journey. It comes from Aristotle’s Poetics, the original backbone of Western narrative. It’s 2,000 years old. It governs nearly every blockbuster film, every novel on the bestseller list, every story we’ve been told since childhood.

The hero has a want (bring peace to the galaxy) and a need (overcome a personal flaw). They go on a journey. They face obstacles. They achieve the want by fulfilling the need. The End.

Here’s the problem: that structure is individualistic, extractive, and violent.

Think about Jason and the Argon...

—Lauren Walker

Episode Summary

Lauren Walker is a storyteller who’s spent 25 years behind the scenes.

Reader’s Digest in the 1990s, where she learned direct marketing when things were still on paper. A couple of dot-com startups during the boom. Thirteen years at IBM, writing deep technical marketing before becoming the editor of IBM.com’s homepage.

She’s been working remotely since 2005. Twenty years of distributed work before it became the default.

Now she’s CMO at Coworks, a coworking space software company. And in February 2026, she helped organise the Coworking Operators Weekend in Raleigh—a small, focused gathering of 40 operators and managers at Raleigh Founded.

The event started in LA in 2025. Jerome Chang and Jackie Latragna created it with one principle: small, no bells and whistles, just operators talking. Sean Brown, CEO of Coworks, attended and loved it. Jerome asked if Coworks wanted to bring it to the East Coast. They said yes.

Lauren describes the energy simply: “It was folks recognising game. It was folks saying, I do what you do, you do what I do, but how do you do it?”

What made it work was what it wasn’t. No vendor presentations. No polished keynotes. Just operators sharing what they’d learned by doing the work.

There’s something else worth naming here, because Lauren shared it publicly after the event.

She has brain cancer. She’s in remission, but she lives with a tumour on her cerebellum. The radiation treatment left visible effects—her face is droopy, her eye doesn’t blink, she walks with an unusual gait.

She’d been hiding. Camera positioned to show her left side on calls. AI-generated headshot. Avoiding in-person events despite wanting to be there.

Her anxiety about the Operators Weekend wasn’t about the logistics or the agenda. It was about explaining her face.

But the people she told were warm and understanding. No one ran. She showed up anyway.

That matters. Not because it’s inspirational theatre, but because it shows what these events actually are: spaces where operators can be honest about what’s hard without performing strength they don’t feel.

Bernie and Lauren talk through the tactical lessons from the weekend—the downtown alliance hack, the circus metaphor for marketing, the AI panel’s three questions, and what FLOC is doing about career paths in coworking.

This episode is for operators who need their peers more than they need another conference.

Timeline Highlights

[01:27] Lauren on being a marketer: “I’m not really known for anything because I’m a marketer. I have to be behind the scenes. But that is what I’m known for. I’m a content marketer. I’m a storyteller.”

[02:55] On 20 years of remote work: “IBM... they kicked us out in 2005. They said, Work from home. I have been working remote for 20 years.”

[05:25] The origin of COW: “Let’s have a small event. Let’s not plan this. Let’s not have bells and whistles. Let’s just get together and talk.”

[06:42] Game recognising game: “These are the people doing the work. These are not the consultants. These are not the vendors.”

[08:25] On articulating value to cities: “It’s being able to discuss the economic impact that you are having on that local area.”

[09:41] The downtown alliance solution: “One of the panellists said, We’ll create a downtown alliance. They can work with an alliance.”

[10:39] Proctor’s tactical hack: “Just create a coworking day. Go to your government and say, This is going to be Raleigh coworking Day.”

[11:51] On impact reports: “What goes into what’s called an impact report, and then how do you quantify the value you bring to your city?”

[13:05] The 3-5 year drop-off: “She’s really identified this drop-off after the first 3-5 years... we’re missing a pipeline of growth.”

[14:26] Role title confusion: “Sometimes they’re hiring for a community manager, but what they really need is an operations coordinator.”

[16:45] Samantha Reel’s AI questions: “What are you spending the most time doing? What are you ignoring that’s high value? And what is messy and should be cleaned up?”

[17:35] Taylor Mason on training AI: “Everything that you put into it, you’ll get out of it. So if you don’t train your AI... you’re going to get something very generic.”

[20:04] The real AI fear: “There was a concern like, is this going to change the makeup of our membership?”

[23:26] The circus metaphor begins: “If you have a circus and you went looking for the right town to be in, that is market research.”

[25:24] Marketing advice: “What’s the goal? What do you want to achieve?... work backward from that.”

[26:19] Channel strategy: “Where is your audience? What channel do they use?... And go there”

The Downtown Alliance Hack

Here’s the problem operators keep hitting.

You want to work with your city. You want them to understand the economic value you’re creating—the businesses you’re launching, the foot traffic you’re bringing downtown, the parking revenue, the local spending.

But when you approach your local government, they say: “We can’t show favour to a specific business.”

Dead end.

One operator at the Coworking Operators Weekend raised exactly this. Their city wouldn’t collaborate because working with one coworking space would be preferential treatment.

A panellist solved it in one sentence: “We’ll create a downtown alliance. They can work with an alliance.”

Lauren explains what that means: “Work with the local coffee shop, work with the local printer, work with folks that are on this business corridor and create an alliance, and then your city can work with that alliance.”

It’s not a coworking space asking for support. It’s a coalition of local businesses presenting a unified economic case.

The city can’t work with you alone. But they can work with an entity that represents multiple stakeholders.

This is already happening in the US. Lauren mentions the Denver Alliance, the Atlanta Alliance. City-based alliances, interest-based alliances. The infrastructure exists.

For UK operators navigating the business rates crisis, this is the playbook. You’re not asking for relief for your space. You’re asking on behalf of a corridor, a district, a coalition of independents who are all absorbing the same systemic pressure.

That’s a political entity. That’s something a council can work with.

The Impact Report You’re Not Writing

Lauren talks about the “impact report” like it’s obvious, but most operators aren’t doing it.

“What goes into what’s called an impact report, and then how do you quantify the value you bring to your city? Collect this data, look at this data, and then present it.”

What data?

* The number of businesses you’re launching.

* The number of people coming downtown for lunch because your members are there.

* The number of people using the parking deck.

* The total local spend your members generate in the surrounding area.

This isn’t marketing fluff. This is economic evidence.

Cities care about footfall. They care about business formation. They care about parking revenue because that funds other services. They care about vitality in the city centre.

I...

—Teresa Jackson

The journey continues - May 19th

On May 19th at Space4, the Unreasonable Connection Goes Live! The London Coworking Assembly Forum is back for part two.

A one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive.

Episode Summary

Teresa Jackson didn’t set out to become a coworking pioneer.

She was working from a flat in Glasgow’s city centre, bouncing between her dining table and a sofa three feet away. You know that feeling—laptop balanced on your knees, no separation between work and life, the walls closing in a bit more each day.

She’d been running a networking organisation called 4 Networking—23 groups across Scotland in the first year—and knew plenty of freelancers and small business owners in the same boat.

So she asked a few of them: what if we rented an office together?

A few people said yes. Then she signed the lease on an attic space on John Street. No lift. Tiny kitchen. A proper commitment.

Then, as often happens when it’s time to actually pay, some of those people vanished into the sunset.

She was left holding the keys to a building she couldn’t afford alone.

That moment—being stuck with the bills and no plan—is where Collabor8te actually began.

Teresa applied the membership model she knew from networking to the space. Monthly subscription. No long-term commitment. Book what you need when you need it. She started with a 32-hour membership, then added a 12-hour “now and then” option when people said they liked the idea but weren’t sure they’d use it that much.

That was 2014. By 2016, they’d moved to 22 Montrose Street—a Victorian sandstone building in the Merchant City with 40 desks, 9 meeting rooms, and room for about 100 people at any one time.

Today, Collabor8te has 350 members. It’s still all subscription. Still no dedicated desks. Still monthly, flexible, all-inclusive.

Bernie and Teresa talk through what it actually means to run a space like this—where members can cancel with a month’s notice, but you’re locked into a long-term lease.

They discuss the difference between networking (transactional, two hours of business development) and coworking (ambient learning from just being in the room).

They get into Teresa’s B Corp journey, which started as a lockdown project and ended with a governance structure that legally prevents the space from being sold to private equity.

And they talk about the 4-day work week Teresa introduced for her staff, and how that works when your business is meant to be open and welcoming all the time.

This episode is for anyone who’s ever signed a lease and then realised they had no idea what they were doing.

Timeline Highlights

[01:18] Teresa on what she’d like to be known for: “Providing the most welcoming coworking space that is possible to... in the world.”

[02:09] The accidental start: “I got into coworking by a complete accident.”

[03:09] When commitment gets real: “I found myself with a building... with the bills to pay, and was a bit like, Oh, dear, I’m going to have to do something about this”

[03:46] The model that never changed: “It’s always been monthly. It’s always been all-inclusive memberships.”

[05:11] Bernie on whether Teresa questions her model: “Do you see other people doing different memberships and go, Oh, my God, am I doing this right?”

[06:00] Teresa on why their model works: “I think where we are based in the city centre, that we’re all subscription, we do buck the trend.”

[06:49] On attracting the right people: “We attract a certain type of person because of what we do here... you have to want to share.”

[07:27] Glasgow’s first: “It was the first coworking space in Glasgow.”

[08:40] How people come for community now: “Now I think people are drawn to, I want to be with other people. I don’t want to be sitting at home on my own all the time.”

[10:19] On the “hijacking” of coworking: “Everyone thinks they can open a coworking space these days. It’s just always nice and easy. But... it’s a big risk.”

[13:15] Teresa on the accidental nature of it: “If I hadn’t found myself in that situation, would I have done it? I don’t know.”

[16:54] Natural networking: “You aren’t just networking with people while you’re making a coffee in the kitchen... you get to know your fellow coworkers and become friends.”

[18:18] The B Corp project: “We wanted a project. We were a bit bored... this would be a good challenge.”

[22:20] What B Corp revealed: “We learned lots of things. One of the main things, I think, was we had to write things down.”

[24:18] The 4-day week and other changes: “We introduced some things... private health care... cycle to work scheme... a four-day working week.”

The Widow-Maker Lease

Let’s be clear about what Teresa signed herself up for.

A commercial lease in Glasgow’s Merchant City on a Victorian sandstone building is likely a 10-year Full Repairing and Insuring lease. That means every crack in the facade, every leak in the roof, every drain that backs up—that’s on her. Not the landlord. Her.

If the Victorian roof at 22 Montrose Street fails, Teresa pays to fix it. If the sandstone needs repointing, Teresa pays. If the boiler dies in January, Teresa pays.

This isn’t a month-to-month WeWork membership. This is a decade-long liability that could bankrupt you if the building turns against you.

And who are her customers? People paying £200 a month who can cancel with 30 days’ notice.

Teresa absorbs 100% of the risk. Her members carry none.

“I found myself with a building... with the bills to pay, and was a bit like, Oh, dear, I’m going to have to do something about this.”

That “Oh, dear” is doing a lot of work. It’s the voice of someone who’s just realised they’re standing on the edge of a financial cliff, and the only way forward is to build a bridge while walking across it.

Most people in that situation would panic and try to lock members into long-term contracts. Annual commitments. Upfront payments. Anything to create certainty.

Teresa did the opposite. She made it easier to leave.

Monthly memberships. Cancel anytime. No questions asked.

Why?

Because she understood something fundamental: you can’t build community by trapping people.

The subscription model works because it builds trust rather than extracting commitment. Members don’t stay because they’re locked in. They stay because they don’t want to leave.

That’s a completely different kind of certainty. And it only works if you’re willing to carry the risk yourself.

The Glasgow Texture

Montrose Street sits in the Merchant City, the heart of old Glasgow money. The buildings here are Victorian sandstone—the kind that turns golden in rare Scottish sunlight and looks like they’re brooding the rest of the time.

This neighbourhood used to belong to the Tobacco Lords, the merchants who built Glasgow’s wealth on transatlantic trade. The warehouses that once stored tobacco now store something else: human capital, ideas, the quiet hum of people working on things that might or might not succeed.

Teresa’s building has weight. Thick walls. High ceilings. The kind of space that m...

“We’re not a service provider beyond being a great space. I think we’re a platform, and that’s key.”

Hannah Philp

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

Hannah Philp is sitting in ARC Tottenham when this conversation happens.

Even through the recording, the space feels calm—that’s the word Hannah keeps using, and you can hear why. It’s designed to be the antidote to the chaos of working from a kitchen table.

Bernie mentions he’s known ARC since the beginning, back when they hosted Urban MBA’s 12-week programme in 2021, just as London was allowed to meet in person again during COVID.

That history matters because it grounds what Hannah’s trying to do.

She didn’t set out to fix London’s housing crisis or redesign the high street.

She spotted a simpler, more personal problem.

Pre-COVID, she watched people—particularly new parents, carers, anyone with responsibilities beyond their income-generating work—drop out of the paid workforce because the 9-to-5 commute (really 8-to-6 if we’re honest) was incompatible with their lives.

The only options were expensive serviced offices for venture-backed companies or working at the kitchen table. Nothing existed for the solo entrepreneur or small team who needed somewhere between those extremes.

Hannah’s “why” isn’t abstract.

It’s watching people she knew become isolated. It’s recognising that loneliness in dense urban environments has accelerated since the advent of smartphones. It’s believed that doing focused solo work among other people mitigates that loneliness without demanding you participate in organised networking.

What started as neighbourhood coworking turned into something more pragmatic: a partnership model with residential developers who control ground floors.

Not because developers suddenly care about community (though some do).

Because the economics of residential development in the UK have become so challenging that social value is now commercially necessary to unlock planning permission.

Bernie asks the question most listeners are thinking: Aren’t developers the problem?

Hannah’s answer is refreshingly honest. She knows ARC’s limits. She’s not an urban planner or housing minister. She’s working with what exists—developers who need to make buildings financially viable and councils who want social outcomes.

ARC bridges that gap.

Then Bernie mentions something Hannah clearly doesn’t want to discuss: a central London hub that wasn’t commercially sustainable.

“It’s painful to talk about, Hannah,” Bernie says.

“I know,” she replies, and they don’t go deeper.

But that failure taught them what they’re building now. The developer partnership model exists because going it alone in expensive central London didn’t work.

The stakes are clearer when you understand what failure looks like.

If ground floors stay empty—which they are across the UK—high streets die. Mum-and-pop businesses can’t afford business rates or twenty-year leases. US private equity buys up chains, loads them with debt, and only institutional money can survive.

The neighbourhood loses the bakery, the dry cleaner, and the antique shop.

Meanwhile, new residential buildings keep getting built. Someone will decide what goes on those ground floors.

If operators don’t partner with developers, it’ll be another Tesco Metro, or the space will sit empty.

In Tottenham, ARC received backing from Haringey Council’s Opportunity Workspace Fund.

The social value metrics aren’t marketing fluff—they’re contractual obligations embedded deep in the business plan. Hannah describes ARC as a platform for local organisations already doing brilliant work in the neighbourhood, not a service provider helicoptering in with programmes nobody asked for.

The three current ARC clubs—Earlsfield in southwest London, Stratford in East London, and Tottenham in North London—operate identically in format but differ significantly in practice.

Hannah admits this was humbling. Even with similar member profiles, people's preferences for how to use space vary widely.

This isn’t a business plan you can copy and paste.

What Bernie and Hannah both recognise is that the best neighbourhood coworking spaces become what Hannah calls “your other local”—the gym, the pub, the place you buy bread.

Where accidental interaction happens.

Where you might not speak to anyone all morning, the presence of other people doing focused work mitigates the loneliness of working by yourself at home.

Hannah calls it “small c connection,” and it’s the majority of what happens at ARC. Not events. Not networking. Just being around colleagues—even if they’re working on different things.

The sense of being seen without forced interaction.

For operators wondering whether neighbourhood coworking is viable, Hannah offers pragmatic hope.

Work with forward-thinking developers. Be clear about what you can and can’t do. Acknowledge commercial imperatives without compromising your social mission. Be a platform, not a service provider.

And most importantly: learn from what doesn’t work.

The central London failure matters as much as the Tottenham success.

Timeline Highlights

[00:04] Bernie introduces the tension: “The commute and being a neighbourhood workspace... one size does not fit all.”

[01:37] Hannah on ARC’s mission: “We deliver in partnership with new residential developers to open spaces that make working life more calm, more local, more human.”

[02:13] “We go to the neighbourhoods where people are doing exciting things... We can be a place that’s potentially a catalyst for positive change.”

[03:07] The pre-COVID origin: “We wanted to create somewhere that would sit between a draining commute or working at the kitchen table, and that would support focus.”

[04:50] On mitigating loneliness: “Doing that among other people really helps... You could just be coming in and just being around my colleagues versus sitting at home by myself.”

[06:40] The “other local” concept: “ARC [is] your other local... where accidental interaction happens... the majority of connection is this small c connection.”

[07:26] Tottenham partnership approach: “We’re working with the council to actually connect with people who are already doing fantastic work in the neighbourhood... We can just be a space for them.”

[08:26] The platform principle: “We’re not a service provider beyond being a great space... I think we’re a platform, and that’s key.”

[09:27] Mixing communities: “We want to be a diverse hub... a mix of an existing community and new people... ensuring that these new buildings are also delivering social value for everyone in the local area.”

[10:41] UK development reality: “The economics of residential development in the UK are really, really challenging... Construction costs have massively risen... The risks have gone way up.”

[13:46] Commercial pragmatism: “We can help [developers] realise their commercial outcomes by putting something just brilliant and useful on the ground flo...

“We seem to be out front with this when it comes to, I suppose, government support at a national level of coworking as an industry.”

Graham Clarke

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

Graham Clarke didn’t set out to wire an entire country for coworking.

He was a community manager in a space in Ireland, burnt out from running events just to hit KPIs, when the Western Development Commission approached Baseworx with a question: Could a single booking system connect over 100 rural hubs?

That was 2018. Now it’s 407 locations. For-profit, not-for-profit, social enterprises, and major operators—all on one platform.

You can land at Dublin Airport, hit “near me,” book a hot desk in Skibbereen, and get a pin code sent to your phone before you leave the terminal. If the hub has integrated access control, you can walk in and start working without speaking to anyone.

But the real story isn’t the technology.

It’s what happened when hub managers across Ireland started talking to each other once a month. When they realised they could pool their buying power to negotiate better deals on EV chargers. When a digital nomad could extend their holiday because they found a desk 30 minutes from the beach.

Graham has seen both sides: the operator trying to keep the lights on, and the software builder trying to automate the boring bits so operators can focus on the human work. In this conversation with Bernie, they explore the economics of who pays for coworking (the bootstrapper vs. the corporate remote worker), the “golf clubification” thesis (what if coworking memberships were curated like BNI chapters?), and why the best thing software can do is act as “guard rails” to prevent community manager burnout.

This episode is for anyone who thinks coworking is just about desks and WiFi. Graham and Bernie talk about Ireland’s post-crash entrepreneurial mindset, the housing crisis threatening the “brain gain” success, and why proximity still matters when your members could work from anywhere.

Timeline Highlights

[02:55] Bernie asks Graham to explain Connected Hubs: “That’s revolutionary”

[03:24] Graham on Ireland’s lead: “We seem to be out front with this when it comes to, I suppose, government support at a national level of coworking as an industry.”

[04:58] The three pillars of Connected Hubs: “A team to run it... capital funding to upgrade... a standardised booking engine.”

[06:23] Graham on the national event calendar and economic impact: “I think it’s after contributing, as of last year, 1.6 billion to the economy in its current structure.”

[09:58] The collaborative culture: “Once a month, there’s an open call, and they have a dedicated community manager who gets all the hub managers together.”

[10:23] Group buying power in action: “They were able to sit down and compare notes, and actually collaborate and say, Right, if we wait 10 of them off you, what can you do as a deal on?”

[14:28] Ireland’s startup support system: “Every county council has its own local enterprise office.”

[16:00] The runway advantage: “If you’re a startup that can do business globally and you don’t need to be paying Dublin rent, then that absolutely has an effect on your runway as well.”

[20:56] Graham’s “golf clubification” thesis: “Is there an opportunity to have a coworking space where you have one person from one space or one industry... it’s, I don’t want to say exclusive, but it is like you’re voted in”

[24:23] Bernie on intentional business groups: “When you sit down with a group of fellow business people with intention and vulnerability and openness and trust, it all moves faster.”

[26:56] The directory solution: “That’s why I think it’s important to have a directory anyway in your coworking space.”

[29:14] The demographic shift: “I would contest that that may not be the same today because the audience and the user type of coworking space has shifted, where you have more employees of larger businesses now.”

[33:09] The critical hire: “One of the most important people you can have in your coworking business is a good community manager.”

[34:42] Software as protection: “If you can get all that stuff automated and worked out, you can leave them in the community management place.”

Connected Hubs: When Booking Becomes Infrastructure

Bernie called it revolutionary. He’s right.

But to understand why, you have to understand what the Western Development Commission was actually solving for.

The West Coast of Ireland wasn’t just losing young people to Dublin. It was experiencing decades of structural abandonment—the legacy of an economy that concentrated wealth and opportunity in urban centres whilst rural areas managed decline. When the 2008 crash hit, multinationals laid off skilled workers who would have historically emigrated to London or Boston.

This time, the Irish government tried something different.

The WDC identified over 200 spaces suitable for knowledge workers. Enterprise centres. Community halls. Dated business centres that needed upgrading but had good bones.

Their research said you need three things:

A team to run it. Capital funding to bring spaces up to modern standards. A standardised booking system.

Baseworx became that third pillar.

Now there are 407 locations. Graham clarifies: “All of the different, I suppose, entity types and for-profit, not-for-profit, social enterprises, and even some of the larger well-known operators, all on one system.”

This isn’t just Airbnb for coworking. It’s post-austerity infrastructure. It’s what happens when a government treats remote work as a regional development policy, not a tech perk.

You can book a hot desk, a meeting room, or an office. Depending on the hub’s access control setup, you might receive a QR code or a PIN on your phone. You sell the service yourself.

But the system also powers community infrastructure: event calendars, blogs, a collaborative news board. By default, Ireland now has a national coworking event calendar. You can see what’s happening in every corner of the country.

The economic case is measurable: independent economists estimated the project contributed €1.6 billion to the Irish economy as of 2024.

Graham talks about the human side, though. Extended holidays. Working near home. Choosing to stay in the village instead of moving to the city.

The Collaborative Culture That Makes It Work

Picture this: It’s a Tuesday morning. You’re a hub manager in rural Ireland. Your WiFi’s been dodgy. Your biggest member just left. You’re trying to decide whether to invest in an EV charger but you’ve never bought one before and the quotes you’re getting range from €3,000 to €12,000.

You’re alone with this.

Except you’re not.

Most coworking networks are competitive. Connected Hubs is collaborative.

Once a month, an open call brings hub managers together. They share what’s working. They talk about what failed. They compare notes.

Graham tells the EV charger story.

EV chargers were ...

Ian Minor

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

Hospitality has become one of those words shouted from every coworking LinkedIn post, usually next to a photo of a nice coffee machine.

But Ian Minor has spent 30 years in actual hospitality—nightclubs, bars, restaurants, and health clubs across three continents. The kind with burns, late nights, and a ruthless feedback loop where if the vibe dies, the room empties.

He created Working From_ for The Hoxton. He’s a partner at Brave Corporation with Caleb Parker. He’s rethought everything from what you call your front desk staff to how many times a day you should nod at a member in the corridor.

This conversation strips away the Instagram aesthetic and answers the hard question: what does hospitality actually cost when you’ve got two staff and a hundred members?

This episode is for operators who know “hospitality” matters but aren’t sure what they’re supposed to do about it with limited resources.

Timeline Highlights

[02:53] Ian’s definition: “Hospitality is the art of being hospitable.”

[03:37] “You’re going for an experience within hospitality, and that’s the thing that you’re really delivering. The food and the drink, for me, are part of the product, but they’re not the main thing.”

[06:03] What an experience actually is: “Trying to make something that’s personal to that customer.”

[07:28] The reputation multiplier: “That starts to build a reputation that has come from the experience or the service that they’ve been given... which was more than what they were expecting”

[10:20] Going above and beyond: “If you always go above and beyond what is expected, you’re always going to deliver a lot more than what they even wanted, but they’ll always remember it.”

[15:19] The critical question for operators: “What level of hospitality can they comfortably give with the current operation they have, and what do they aspire to give?”

[16:54] The language shift: “I changed from reception to host. I’ve always called that department the Host Team.”

[21:52] The test: “The human connection that you’re driving or you’re trying to get to is what can define whether or not your hospitality or not.”

[22:47] Restaurant staff costs: “Anything between, let’s say, 23 to 28% of revenue goes on staff salaries.”

[24:06] Flexible workspace reality: “You could probably be down, and what I’ve seen from what I’ve done, between 9% to 11% staff cost against revenue.”

[26:38] Where to start: “Understanding if they’ve got operational manuals written, if they’ve got standard operating procedures written, which are the SOPs.”

[27:55] Why consistency matters: “This break in consistency is the worst thing that you can have in an operation because as a customer, you just don’t know what you’re actually getting from them.”

[29:03] Mapping the member day: “What does their day look like and how many touch points... can I get a nod... or a quick one-minute chat along their day.”

[31:07] The foundation: “The first point of hospitality is just making sure that the service is consistent at the very basic level.”

[32:34] The final instruction: “Just think about what you can deliver and then just try and deliver that consistently at a high level and then a higher level as much as you possibly can.”

The Kitchen Confidential of the Workspace

Ian Minor doesn’t come from the world of serviced offices or real estate.

He comes from nightclubs. Bars. Restaurants. Health clubs. Late-night operations across three continents.

In that world, the feedback loop is immediate and brutal. If the vibe is wrong, the room empties. If the ice runs out, if the security is too aggressive, if the lighting is too harsh—revenue collapses that night.

There are no five-year leases to hide behind.

Bernie captures it perfectly: “If you’ve ever worked in hospitality, there’s like grind, hard work, blood, sweat, and tears and a lot of burns and cuts from doing it.”

When coworking spaces started shouting “hospitality!” around 2020, Ian saw a gap. The sophisticated consumer—used to the high-touch service of a Soho House or a boutique hotel—was being forced into sterile, fluorescent-lit serviced offices with receptionists who barely looked up.

He realised the skills of the nightclub operator—lighting, sound, service speed, emotional connection—were exactly what the office market lacked.

So he brought them over.

What Hospitality Actually Means

Bernie asks directly: “If someone bumped into you in Liverpool Street Station and said, What’s hospitality? What would you say?”

Ian’s answer is deceptively simple: “Hospitality is the art of being hospitable.”

But he immediately adds layers.

It’s not about the product. It’s about the experience.

“You’re going for an experience within hospitality, and that’s the thing that you’re really delivering. The food and the drink, for me, are part of the product, but they’re not the main thing.”

Bernie illustrates this with his own example—a taco place in Vigo. It looks like a greasy spoon. It’s chaotic. The guy behind the counter is shouting. But the food is brilliant, and they walk 20 minutes in the rain on Sunday nights to go there.

That’s hospitality.

Not designed. Not Instagram-ready. But felt.

Ian explains what makes it work: “It’s understanding or taking cues from the individual that’s gone in there or the couple that has gone in there... trying to learn a little bit about them... then seeing what little added things that you can do during the course of that sitting to make it extra special.”

The test: when they leave, are they still talking about it weeks later?

If yes, you’ve created an experience. If no, you’ve just completed a transaction.

The Motivation Question

Bernie presses on with motivation.

Is it about making someone’s day, or is it about making them come back?

Ian cuts straight to it: both are true, but the driver should be love.

He talks about a moment from his own career—serving a couple who used to come into a bar at Lakeside Shopping Centre. They ordered a margarita with no salt and a Corona. Three years later, they walked into the Covent Garden branch where Bernie was working. He just put their drinks in front of them without saying a word.

They were stunned. “How did you know?”

Bernie got a real kick out of that moment—not because it guaranteed loyalty, but because it was a random act of care.

Ian: “You can do this in any walk of life. You can engage with life or not engage with life. If you engage with it, you’re always going to get better and reach your experiences from that.”

If you always go above and beyond what is expected, you’re always going to deliver a lot more than what they even wanted, but they’ll always remember it.

Yes, this might lead to a good tip or repeat business. But the deeper reward is personal.

“You’re going home from your shift or your night’s work or your day’s work, knowing that fo...

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

*On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive.*

It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

Lee Dalgleish fixes problems.

Not the tidy, admin problems.

The ones where young people leave town because there’s nothing for them.

Where historic buildings rot because nobody knows how to bring them back.

Where talent drains to bigger cities because local economies can’t retain it.

He’s the Commercial Property Manager at The Heaton Group in Wigan.

But that title doesn’t capture what he actually does.

The Heaton Group bought Eckersley Mills in October 2021. Three massive mills from the late 1800s, right in the centre of Wigan, sitting between Manchester and Liverpool.

The sort of place most people write off as too expensive, too complicated, too far gone.

They renamed it Cotton Works.

Then they started building something nobody expected.

Three Mills Pub opened in May 2024.

Four and a half thousand square feet with original slab stone flooring. The sort of character you can’t fake.

Lee’s daughter manages it now.

Feast at the Mills followed in October 2023.

An outdoor food hall in the old weaving sheds. DJs, street food, families, dog walkers, and bottomless brunches.

Over 2,000 people show up every weekend in summer.

But here’s what matters.

Cotton Works isn’t just hospitality. It’s a regeneration project built to stop the brain drain.

Wigan Youth Zone sits at 35,000 square feet. The largest youth facility of its kind in Europe.

Young people aged five to early twenties. Non-means-tested.

Music studios, climbing frames, arts, life skills. Teaching kids how to use a washing machine and turn on a dishwasher alongside creative work.

Lee’s the Chair of Development on the committee.

The Youth Zone runs on patrons—local businesses that support financially and in-kind. IT companies, joiners, and electricians.

Not just writing cheques. Doing the work.

Then there’s Weave.

The coworking space at Cotton Works. Hot desks, resident desks, offices.

Built to keep Wigan’s young talent in Wigan. To stop the exodus to Manchester and Liverpool that costs the town billions.

And the Friday Club.

Second Friday of every month. Over 250 people. Free drink when you arrive.

Business owners from Bolton, Warrington, St Helens. Doors that were slamming shut elsewhere stay open here.

All the proceeds go to local charities. Team Wigan & Leigh. The Brick. Daffodils Dreams. Wigan & Leigh Hospice. The Youth Zone.

This episode is for operators who’ve been told you need venture capital to make an impact.

For anyone who thinks regeneration belongs to property developers with offshore accounts.

Lee’s got a five-yard rule.

Anyone within five yards who makes eye contact gets a hello.

Sounds basic.

But it’s how you build a town where people don’t just work. They stay.

Timeline Highlights

[02:00] Lee on what he’s known for: “Commercial Property Manager at the Heaton group, Wigan.”

[02:29] What Lee wants to be known for: “If you’ve got a question enough, I can help you. Come to me. I’ll do my best to help you.”

[03:38] Eckersley Mills purchased: “In October 2021, we purchased the Ecclesley site, which is now known today as Cotton Work.s”

[04:56] Three Mills character: “It’s just got full of character... epitomises everything that we’re doing here... the restoration work, the respect that we’re paying to all these buildings.”

[06:22] Keeping people in Wigan: “We’re keeping people in Wigan... You don’t need to go outside of Wigan now. You can do everything in here.”

[07:54] Feast at the Mills: “We opened up that in October 2023... what we wanted to create is just people starting to come down to Cotton Works.”

[10:21] Summer numbers: “In the summer months, we’re getting over 2000 people every weekend into the venue, and it’s just snowballed.”

[12:09] Wigan Youth Zone scale: “Wigan Youthsown is the largest Uson of its kind in Europe. It’s 35,000 square feet.”

[13:35] Youth Zone inclusivity: “It’s not means-tested, Bernie... there’s no way of distinguishing children or young adults when they walk in the building... it’s for everybody and anybody.”

[16:29] Lee’s role: “I’m now Chair of Development within the committee... we bounce off each other, and we support each other.”

[18:54] Weave’s purpose: “Weave is about community... It allows small businesses to organically come in... to collaborate with other like-minded professionals.”

[21:23] Friday Club origin: “Come down on the second Friday of each month to three mills or to Feast at the Mills... you get a free drink... come and meet us.”

[23:32] Friday Club impact: “People are coming up to me now saying... we’ve got clients based in Wigan that we’ve never, ever had before.”

[27:03] Five-yard rule: “Everybody that’s within five yards of me, if they make eye contact with me, I’d know them and say hello to them.”

[29:47] Where to connect: “I’m always here at Cotton Works. I’m based up in Wiv in the centre of Wigan. You can connect with me on LinkedIn.”

What 2,000 People on a Weekend Actually Means

Most coworking spaces spend years trying to build community.

Cotton Works drew 2,000 people per weekend within months of opening Feast at the Mills.

Bernie asked the obvious question. How?

Lee’s answer is simpler than you’d think.

They created a place where people wanted to be.

Not just a venue with food and drink. A space where Doris and George bring their dog for a pint and listen to live music. Where Lee’s daughters turn up for bottomless brunch and DJs.

Where families find activities for kids without feeling like they’re at a soft play centre with alcohol.

“We’ve got dorming on the door, but I beg to differ whether or not we’re at the touch of what we ever need them because everybody comes in.”

No security incidents. No trouble.

Just people from across Wigan finding a reason to come down to the canal on a Friday night.

This isn’t a hospitality strategy.

It’s proof that when you build something the town actually needs, rather than what property developers think will maximise yield, people show up.

Feast at the Mills opened in October 2023. Within a year, it became the place people from outside Wigan know about.

“How do you know Wigan, Mitchell?” Bernie gets asked.

“Feast at the Mills,” they say.

That’s not marketing.

That’s what happens when 2,000 people have a good time and tell their mates.

The Patron Model That Funds a Youth Zone

Wigan Youth Zone costs money to run.

Serious money.

35,000 s...

Rose Radtke

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

Rose Radtke is a brand strategist, writer, and community manager.

She positions herself as a “smart connector”—someone who finds the links between brand, community, and marketing.

Six years deep in community building, she’s watched the word “community” stretch thinner each year.

Everything became a community. Discord servers. Email lists. Substack comments. The word stopped meaning anything specific.

Rose makes a distinction that matters.

Audience, community, and village are not the same thing.

One lets you lurk. One expects participation. One demands mutual care.

Bernie and Rose unpack the framework. They move from COVID’s online community boom to the messy reality of engineering community in coworking spaces.

Rose is watching 2026’s trends closely.

Coworking spaces struggling to meet rent.

Pricing strategies getting flexible—day blocks, modular memberships.

The lines between workspace and third space blurring.

Pop-up markets in coworking spaces. Coworking desks in bookshops and gyms.

And she’s asking a question that hospitality venues should be terrified of:

Why don’t they have community managers?

This episode is for operators tired of using “community” to mean everything and nothing.

It’s for anyone trying to work out whether they’re building an audience, a community, or a village—and what the difference actually means for the people who show up.

Timeline Highlights

[01:51] Rose describes herself: “I’m actually a bit of an octopus. I am a brand strategist, I am a writer, and I’m a community manager.”

[02:12] What she wants to be known for: “Being a real connector, being someone that’s really smart and that connects people up in interesting ways.”

[03:04] The frustration: “We ask it to carry too much. Everything’s a community. We want everything to be a community, and it just carries an awful, awful lot.”

[04:49] The distinction: “Participation is optional. You can either be a lurker... but then you can fluidly move into being a participant.”

[06:46] Village versus community: “In a village, there’s an expectation of care. You extend to each other and everyone has their part to play.”

[08:49] COVID’s turning point: “Communities were lifelines for people in COVID. Most of those communities were online.”

[11:31] Engineering community: “Your branding and your marketing and your community have to work as one for it to work.”

[13:34] Bernie on his favourite spaces: “Started by people who are scratching their own edge.”

[16:25] Rose on 2026 struggles: “Coworking spaces seem to be struggling a bit more this year... a shift towards more flexible memberships.”

[19:46] The blurred lines: “The lines becoming blurred between work space and third space in coworking spaces.”

[21:27] Multi-use strategy: “I want to create reasons for people to stay beyond their work day... and ways to make additional revenue.”

[22:53] Hospitality insight: “I’m really interested in whether or why hospitality venues don’t have community managers. I feel like that’s madness.”

[24:19] Multi-use excitement: “Really make it multi-use. That’s a really interesting and exciting space at the moment.”

[26:38] The future is now: “Lines are being blurred in lots of areas, and I think spatially, that’s the case as well.”

The Three-Type Framework

Rose has been working in community for six years.

She started through branding—branding communities, finding the work fascinating.

Then the word stretched.

“Over the last 6-8 years, we ask it to carry too much. Everything’s a community. We want everything to be a community, and it just carries an awful, awful lot.”

She’s right.

The word “community” used to mean something specific. Now it means anything a brand wants it to mean.

Rose thinks we need to go back to basics.

Stop calling everything a community. Work out what you’re actually running.

An audience is passive.

They consume what you produce. They might engage, but they don’t expect to be part of the thing.

A community is fluid.

Participation is optional. You can lurk. You can absorb what you’re reading, overhear conversations, eye things up.

Then you can fluidly move into being a participant when you’re ready.

No pressure. No expectation.

A village is different.

Everyone’s participation is needed. Everyone has a role. There’s an expectation of care.

You extend care to each other.

Even if your role is just taking your rubbish out on the right day, you have to participate.

Rose thinks coworking sits somewhere between community and village, depending on how the space is designed.

Some members want to get out of their house. Leave behind the mess and the half-eaten Rice Krispies. Work somewhere clean and tidy.

Get their head down. Leave at the end of the day. Go home.

That’s valid.

Other people want to network. They want to go to a place where people know their name.

They want to be part of the programme, learn stuff, be all in.

That’s valid too.

Both are community. But they’re not the same kind of community.

Calling them both “community” without distinction makes the word useless.

COVID Broke the Word

COVID was a huge turning point.

Community went online. It had to.

Online communities became lifelines for people. They were essential, not optional.

“We piled a lot on the word community during COVID,” Rose says.

“That is where it all became a bit stretched and misshapen.”

She’s not wrong.

The word community used to imply something physical, something local, something you could walk to.

COVID made it mean “any group of people who talk to each other online.”

Online communities are just as important and valid as in-person communities.

But they’re very different.

The expectations are different. The rhythms are different. The care structures are different.

We’ve never quite come back from that.

The word “community” now has to work for both. It has to mean your local pub and your Discord server. Your coworking space and your Substack comments section.

No wonder it’s irritating.

Engineering Community in Coworking

Rose makes a distinction that matters.

Some coworking spaces start because someone needed a place to work. They had extra space. They built something around what they were doing.

The Skiff in Brighton. Coworking Lisboa in Lisbon. Indy Hall.

Other spaces start as a brand first.

Someone decides to start a coworking space. They build the brand, then they build the community.

Both can wo...

Georgia Norton

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

Georgia Norton spent spring 2024 interviewing founders, childcare workers, and parents across co-located childcare and coworking spaces.

What she documented wasn’t a pandemic oddity for affluent families.

It was a structural shift in how people want to arrange work and care.

The report, “The Case for Childcare plus coworking,” argues that these spaces should be treated as essential social infrastructure, not premium amenities.

Georgia calls it social infrastructure because that’s what it functions as:

* Places where work happens alongside childcare

* Where childcare workers gain professional development opportunities shoulder to shoulder with laptop workers

* Where bridges get built between people who’d never otherwise meet

But Georgia’s facing pushback from two contradictory directions.

Front one: This is elitist. How could this ever be universal childcare?

The spaces look too nice, too intentional about natural light and materials.

Front two: Not everyone wants work and care integrated.

Some people prefer separation, long commutes, and wrap-around daycare.

Both critiques miss what Georgia is actually arguing.

She’s not trying to universalise a single model.

She’s pointing out that thousands of families restructured their lives during the pandemic and don’t want to return to the way things were.

They’ve tasted something different—messy, overlapping, human—and the old binary (office or home, parent or professional, boss or employee) feels like a lie.

The teens who kept wearing sliders and pyjama pants to school after lockdown?

That’s the same cultural shift.

We loosened our grip on “how things are supposed to be” and got more realistic about what actually matters.

Georgia names fixable barriers:

* Licensing rules that block grant access

* Outdated funding structures

* The assumption that childcare innovation requires private equity backing

She’s taking these findings to the House of Lords in June.

She’s exploring intergenerational models that integrate eldercare alongside childcare.

Her next horizon isn’t scaling Playhood into a chain—it’s asking smarter policy questions about how to fund site-specific, adaptive models that serve neighbourhoods.

This episode is for:

Space operators are wondering if childcare integration makes sense.

Parents who’ve felt the guilt of separation and want to explore alternatives.

Anyone asking whether coworking can do more than rent desks—whether it can actually function as civic infrastructure that builds bridges across differences.

⏱ Timeline Highlights

[02:07] What Georgia wants to be known for: “Making an impact... putting that report to work to help inspire entrepreneurs, to defend the childcare workforce.”

[03:34] The provocative question that drove the report: “So many people wanted this... Why aren’t we funding models to pilot this?”

[04:56] Why the report’s lens was American: “I’m sitting on more of a global picture.”

[05:53] The tension Georgia feels most: “What concerns me most is this idea that we’re returning to the norms from before.”

[09:10] On loosening standards: “We all loosened our standards... But I think we just got more realistic about, let’s not waste any time on that separation.”

[10:20] The power of bridges: “We need bridges to other people... not binary employee versus boss, teacher versus parent.”

[11:11] What the pandemic revealed: “The pandemic let us see childcare workers as key workers... We should hold on to models that integrate with families.”

[14:03] The contradictory feedback: “Two key pieces of feedback contradict one another—how is this equitable? And also, this isn’t for everyone.”

[15:21] On not dismissing the model: “If there’s a model here that could work in other neighbourhoods, we’ve got to look at smarter ways of funding.”

[16:48] Georgia on fixable problems: “The barriers to making this more accessible—things like you can’t get grants without the licensing. Really old-fashioned things that get in the way. Fixable problems. I like those.”

[17:42] Why childcare changes everything: “When you add or integrate with a childcare offering... there’s something next level going on.”

[19:11] The workforce development story: “One of the strongest stories... is the workforce development that occurs here.”

[24:09] On species needs: “Openness, open-heartedness and open-mindedness to being around other people is absolutely critical to our social cohesion right now.”

[26:30] Small solutions matter: “Microschools, micro-nurseries with coworking show you don’t need the private equity-backed chain—there have to be entrepreneurs trying things out.”

[27:56] What adaptive means: “We need to be site-specific and grow and adapt to meet each other’s needs... potentially even go into the House of Lords in June to share policy ideas.”

The Two-Front Fight

Georgia’s fighting two battles at once.

And they contradict each other completely.

Front one: This is elitist. How could this ever be universal childcare?

The spaces she profiled look gorgeous. Full of plants, natural light, and intentional materials.

People see that and assume expensive, inaccessible, designed for the 2.5% with disposable income.

Georgia pushes back hard: “It’s really sad to me that people assume we can’t all have nice things.”

Why should designing for human thriving automatically signal exclusivity?

Front two: Not everyone wants this.

Loads of parents are perfectly happy with the separation between work and care.

They want to commute, drop off, access wrap-around daycare, and keep the worlds distinct.

Georgia’s not arguing against that choice.

She’s arguing against the assumption that integrated models shouldn’t exist because some people prefer separation.

The contradiction exposes the real problem.

We’ve built a system where innovation in childcare is assumed to be the preserve of premium membership models.

And simultaneously, we’ve normalised the idea that “for everyone” means erasing specificity and choice.

Georgia’s not trying to universalise one model.

She’s documenting what happens when you give families actual options—and then asking why we’re not funding more experimentation.

The answer involves fixable barriers like licensing and grant eligibility, not inherent inaccessibility.

What the Pandemic Actually Taught Us

Some people untethered completely after the pandemic.

Sold everything, joined travelling villag...

Szilvia Filep

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

Ten years ago, Szilvia Filep quit her multinational job in Budapest because they wouldn’t let her work remotely.

Back in 2016, that decision meant becoming a freelancer when Hungarian society viewed freelancing as code for “can’t get a proper job.” It meant moving from the capital to Veszprém—a countryside city—with her husband and young daughter. It meant choosing time over salary, proximity over prestige, freedom over the illusion of security.

Today, Szilvia runs the Hungarian Coworking Association, operates a coworking space in Veszprém, and serves as Communications Manager for Coworking Europe. Everything she needs—her kids’ school, her coworking space, the city centre, supermarket, her mother-in-law for childcare—sits within a 10-minute walk from her front door.

She calls it her “10-minute city.” Where Paris has Professor Carlos Moreno’s ambitious 15-minute city vision, Szilvia built her own version through strategic decisions about where to live, what to prioritise, and how to structure work around life instead of life around work.

The contrast with her previous existence is stark. One to one-and-a-half hours each way in Budapest traffic. Now? She chooses how to spend that reclaimed time. Not stuck in traffic jams. Not at the mercy of delayed trains. Freedom to prepare for her day on her own terms.

But here’s what matters for you as a coworking operator: Szilvia’s journey from corporate employee to freelancer to association founder mirrors the transformation happening across Europe right now.

What seemed risky in 2016—outcome-based work, autonomy, side projects, choosing flexibility—has become mainstream. In Hungary, the average person under 35 now spends just two years at one company. The future Szilvia bet on has arrived.

And if freelancing truly is the future of work, then coworking genuinely is the future workplace. Not because of hot desks or good coffee. Because people working flexibly still need human contact.

They need spaces designed around connection, not just productivity. They need to know they’re not alone “slogging it out” trying to make WordPress work or deciding whether to invoice before or after completing the work.

Szilvia’s experience in smaller cities reveals something corporate chains can’t replicate: 60% of her coworking members joined when the space opened two-and-a-half years ago and are still there.

That loyalty stems from limited options, yes—but more powerfully, from genuine belonging. In smaller towns, you run into each other outside the space. The connections run deeper. The community isn’t strategic; it’s real.

This episode is for operators building local coworking spaces, running regional associations, or wondering whether European Coworking Day matters beyond marketing. Szilvia shows how grassroots movements gain credibility through continental connection whilst maintaining fierce local loyalty.

You’ll leave understanding how to design a life that actually fits your values, why freelancing skills translate directly to coworking operations, and how European Coworking Day on 6th May gives your local work the visibility it deserves.

Timeline Highlights

[00:04] Bernie announces European Coworking Day is on the sixth of May

[01:26] Szilvia introduces herself: founder of Coworking Hungary Association, runs a space in Veszprém, recently joined Coworking Europe conference team

[02:07] Coworking Europe 2026 will be in Paris on sixth of November

[02:39] “I’ve created my life, my basic needs in a way that everything is just 10 minutes walk from my home”

[04:52] On reclaimed commute time: “It’s freedom”

[08:34] The brave 2016 decision: “I had to quit. That was the time when I became a freelancer to be able to create the life I wanted to live”

[11:49] Essential freelancing skills: “Creativity... you have to be quite brave... good in marketing and pretty much in sales... personal branding... Very, very thoughtful on financials”

[13:54] Szilvia’s realisation: “It’s just the future of work”

[16:38] On selling outcomes: “It’s not the time what you sell, but it’s the results what you sell”

[17:57] Job tenure in Hungary: “The average time a younger person under 35 years spends at one company is two years”

[21:03] The defining quote: “If freelancing is the future of work, then coworking is the future workplace”

[22:38] Why European Coworking Day matters: “This gives an extra credibility and visibility to the things that we do here in Hungary”

[25:21] On loyalty in smaller cities: “60% of the coworkers who are currently using the space, joined at the very beginning when we opened the space two and a half year ago”

[29:59] Bernie’s reminder: “Collaboration over competition”

The 10-Minute City You Can Build Today

You don’t need municipal permission to create a 10-minute city.

Szilvia designed hers through decisions: choosing Veszprém over Budapest, paying more for a flat near the city centre instead of cheaper suburbs, opening her coworking space within walking distance of her home.

The trade-off was clear. Living centrally costs more. But the return—time, autonomy, presence with her children—proved worth every forint.

Before moving, Szilvia and her husband sat down and asked: “How do we want to lead our family life together?” Both had spent their childhoods travelling to school in different cities. Both commuted 30-40 minutes one way to university in Budapest. Both wanted something different for their kids and themselves.

What makes this relevant for coworking operators? Your members face the same calculation. They’re weighing commute time against flexibility, corporate salaries against autonomy, prestige against presence. The operators who understand this friction—who position their spaces as infrastructure for freedom, not just desks for rent—win the loyalty Szilvia describes.

Sixty per cent retention over two-and-a-half years doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when your space solves a life design problem, not just a workspace problem.

When “Freelancer” Meant “Unemployed”

In 2016, telling people in Hungary you were a freelancer translated roughly to: “I can’t get a proper job.”

Szilvia heard it constantly. “Poor freelancers, it’s how hard for them to get a job, how it’s just not stable, it’s just unpredictable. It’s unsafe financially.”

She could count on her hands how many people she knew doing the same work. So she organised a freelance conference. She ran events for freelancers to meet and learn from each other. She told everyone she could about this emerging way of working.

Ten years later, the world has caught up. Remote work. Outcome-based projects. Side gigs. Portfolio careers. These aren’t fringe anymore—they’re how most knowledge workers operate, whether officially freelance or not.

But here’s the insight that matters: the skills Szilvia needed to succeed as a freelancer in 2016 are exactly the skills coworking operators need today. Creativity. Courage. Marketing yourself ...

Tom Ball

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

Tom Ball has been banging the drum for micro and small businesses longer than most people have been paying attention.

While everyone else obsesses over billion-pound unicorns and corporate flex contracts, Tom’s been quietly building DeskLodge in Bristol—a coworking space that actually makes money whilst refusing to become a soulless corporate service provider.

The tension he lives with daily is the same one every independent coworking operator faces: you can’t be a purist because you can’t pay the bills that way. But you also can’t rip out everything that makes your space special just to chase higher margins.

Tom chose a third path. He runs a financially viable business with a diverse tenant mix—freelancers, small firms, and corporate teams—whilst maintaining what he calls an “indie-friendly culture” and refusing to compromise on the values that matter.

The conversation covers what the last brutal year has done to small coworking spaces, why government and big corporates consistently fail small businesses despite calling them “the backbone of the economy,” and the practical frameworks Tom’s developed over a decade to stay solvent without losing his soul.

He shares DeskLodge’s award-winning flexible pricing model, including the “Flex One Plus” membership that changed how they think about belonging. The environmental design philosophy that treats productivity as a design problem, not a community-building one. The “Pay It Forward” scheme that gives free hot desking to well-connected people between jobs—not out of charity, but as strategic network investment.

This episode is for operators who are exhausted from pretending the last year wasn’t brutal. Who want to support freelancers and micro-businesses but can’t figure out how to make the maths work. Who know their space needs corporate revenue but refuse to become WeWork.

Tom doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. What he has is a decade of making it work whilst staying honest about what it actually takes.

Timeline Highlights

[01:24] Tom on what he’d like to be known for: “They’re actually really productive and we love small companies”

[02:26] The unsung heroes: “I think the unsung heroes are the small companies... Where you spend your money matters. We should be doing more to support these people”

[04:11] The brutal year: “Small coworking spaces... huge verbal hug to everybody out there running a space because the last year has been brutal... The build-up to the last budget was basically creating paralysis and nobody was making decisions”

[05:48] How to support small businesses: “Use small businesses, pay them well... Pay them on time... And give a good fair shout out. Don’t ask for makes rates. Just treat them well”

[07:02] The purist trap: “I don’t think you can be a purist because I don’t think you can pay the bills... We would make more money if we ripped out a load of the hot desking... but we choose not to”

[09:50] Being home for small companies: “The unsung heroes... are the smaller companies who are… They’re not trying to raise a billion pounds... Being a home where they feel happy, safe, productive is a good thing”

[13:24] Environmental design matters: “We’ve got a silent zone... places that are designed for doing video calls... open plan areas... We deliberately designed these different spaces for doing different things”

[16:58] The Flex One Plus insight: “You pay a monthly membership and it gives you one day a month, and then you get a discount rate for other days... having that one a month means you feel that you belong and you’re leaning forward slightly”

[17:31] The pricing breakdown: “It’s 30 quid for a day pass, 25 quid a month with one day included, and then it’s 25 for the extra days”

[21:50] Community acquisition strategy: “The best thing that we do is let other people host their events in our space... free hot desk for free as a group... as a way of pulling in new people”

[23:55] Pay It Forward: “If somebody well connected leaves their job, then I give them a few months free hot desking... It’s a lovely thing to do... what goes around comes around”

[25:29] The Gap defined: “The Gap is from when you realise you’re doing the wrong thing to when you start doing the right thing... We’ve got the wrong energy around it... it’s a time when people want, deserve, need help”

Nobody Actually Believes in Small Teams

Tom doesn’t waste time being diplomatic about this.

Labour is big government. Tories are big corporate. Nobody in power actually believes in smaller teams, despite the rhetoric about small businesses being “the backbone of Britain.”

If you look at government, it’s small teams that make stuff happen. Massive hierarchies spend more time in meetings. Yet policy consistently favours large organisations because that’s where the power sits.

The same pattern shows up in coworking. Everyone talks about community and supporting freelancers. Then they optimise for corporate contracts because that’s where the reliable revenue lives.

Tom’s watched this play out across his members. The two-person consultancy doing brilliant work. The small coffee shop. The slow-growing companies that have been with DeskLodge for a decade, slightly bigger now but not chasing unicorn status.

These are the actual lifeblood of local economies. And they’re systemically unsupported.

Where you spend your money matters. Not as a moral statement—as an economic one. When you choose the indie coffee shop over Starbucks, you’re keeping wealth circulating locally rather than extracting it to shareholders.

The challenge for coworking operators is you can’t run on ideology. You need revenue. The question becomes: how do you build a business model that supports small companies without going broke yourself?

The Brutal Year Everyone’s Pretending Didn’t Happen

Tom offers what he calls “a huge verbal hug to everybody out there running a space because the last year has been brutal.”

Not just tough. Brutal.

And it wasn’t Indies getting picked on whilst chains thrived. The whole market struggled. The build-up to the last budget created paralysis—nobody was making decisions. That meant nobody was moving into spaces. Clients’ pipelines delayed. Projects stalled.

Small coworking operators felt it hardest because they don’t have the cash reserves to weather extended slow periods. One bad quarter threatens survival.

Tom’s point isn’t to wallow. It’s to stop pretending.

Knowing everyone’s finding it tough helps. It’s not you. It’s not your pricing. It’s not your marketing. The external conditions have been genuinely difficult.

You’re in the right place doing the right thing. It won’t be like this forever.

That acknowledgment matters. Too many operators are quietly drowning whilst scrolling past other people’s Instagram posts of “sold out” events and “record months.” The isolation compounds the financial stress.

The indie coworking community needs more honesty about when things are hard. Not as resignation, but as solidarity.

Use Them, Pay Them Well, Pay Them On Time

Tom’s call to action for corporates is blunt.

If you’re a big co...

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

The best version of your space is being specific about who it’s for.

Being for everyone is a recipe for building somewhere nobody belongs.

Rosee Shrestha writes and creates content at Cobot, where she documents what actually works in coworking. Through her newsletter and interviews with operators across Europe, she’s noticed a pattern. The spaces that thrive aren’t casting the widest net. They’re being specific about who they serve—because that’s the only moat they have.

In an industry where the rent keeps climbing and corporate chains can outspend you on marketing, your community is the one thing they can’t replicate.

Bernie and Rosee unpack her recent piece featuring perspectives from Ashley, Silia, and Hector on what’s shaping coworking in 2026.

The thread connecting all their insights? Hyper-local spaces that know exactly who they’re for.

Ashley talks about returning to first principles—community hubs that serve multiple purposes, not just desk rental. Hector describes members choosing an ecosystem that fits into their daily lives, not just a place to sit. Rosee shares what she learned from Selina at Werkhain in Berlin about what it means to be “seen” in a space without anyone forcing interaction on you.

Bernie brings his own observations from FENTO coworking near Vigo, where Camino pilgrims walk past speaking German, Dutch, French, and English—and from a hostel café in Kathmandu where travellers and locals found each other without strategic community programming.

This episode is for operators tired of competing with everyone for nobody in particular.

Timeline Highlights

[01:35] Rosee on what she wants to be known for: “Write in ways that it feels honest and helpful for every operator or just anybody who wants to learn about the industry”

[02:29] The hyper-local thread: “One thing that was in common between every perspective... you really were betting on hyper local coworking spaces”

[03:37] On Ashley’s first principles: “The essence of coworking was just having a hub where people can come together instead of having to work alone at home”

[04:47] The buzzword confession: “Meaningful human connection... it does sound like a buzzword a little bit. But when it comes to coworking, I definitely feel like it’s true”

[05:49] Bernie on foundations shaping communities: “How you build the foundation of your community in the beginning will help shape what happens later on”

[06:15] The Urban MBA example: “Community is basically the Caribbean kitchen at Urban MBA or people taking care of Elena Giroli when she had to be away”

[07:08] Hector’s ecosystem insight: “Work just now happens across so many different settings... does it really fit into everything that I try to do”

[08:42] On Werkhain in Berlin: “It didn’t feel like a coworking spaceship that had landed in the neighbourhood unannounced”

[09:30] What being “seen” actually means: “Having these daily interactions... being supported without really forcing interaction”

[11:06] Bernie on coworking’s grounding effect: “You’re sitting in a room with other people doing the same thing. It’s really grounding”

[12:30] The “for everyone” trap: “Inclusivity also not saying we are open to everybody. It’s just about making this safe space for people, like-minded people”

[16:23] The hostel in Kathmandu: “There was so much cultural exchange going on... one person brings somebody there, then it’s like oh, it’s open for everybody”

[19:56] On travellers with intent: “There’s this energy you get from people travelling with intent”

What “First Principles” Actually Means

Ashley’s phrase stayed in the conversation: getting back to first principles.

Rosee frames it simply: “The essence of that is based around the connection between each other, like how you form the community in a space.”

It’s not nostalgia. It’s recognition that AI and remote work have stripped away so much human contact that the original premise of coworking—gathering with others instead of working alone—matters more than it did five years ago.

When everything else becomes commoditised, the irreducible core remains. People need to see other people. Not through screens. Not in managed corporate environments. In spaces where they can sit with their own thoughts while knowing they’re not alone.

Bernie nails what this actually feels like: sitting in a coworking space knowing you’re not the only one “slogging it out, trying to work out how WordPress works and whether I use ChatGPT for this or Claude for this, or do I send my invoice now and then do the work or do the work and then send the invoice.”

The spaces getting this right aren’t trying to be WeWork. They’re becoming what Rosee calls “multi-purpose community hubs”—places where the coworking is almost incidental to the gathering.

Why “For Everyone” Creates Nobody’s Space

Bernie pushed Rosee on language that matters.

She used the word “tolerant” when discussing inclusion. Bernie picked it up immediately: “If you said to me, you’re going to have to tolerate three women in your coworking space today, I’d be like, I’m not really… that makes me feel like I’m putting up with them.”

Rosee clarified what she actually meant: “It’s about just making this safe space for people, like-minded people who can just be there for each other instead of having to tolerate each other.”

Inclusion doesn’t mean inviting everyone. It means being clear about who your space is for, then making sure those people feel genuinely welcomed—not tolerated. A space for gamers includes gamers. A space for climate activists includes climate activists. A space that supports caregivers considers childcare. A space designed for neurodivergent members considers sensory needs.

Rosee mentions this in her recent article on neurodivergence—”just creating a space where you can actually recognise those people.”

When someone says “our space is for everyone,” they’re really saying “we haven’t thought about who we’re actually serving.”

The Ecosystem Fit

Hector’s contribution reframes how members evaluate spaces.

It’s not: “Is this a nice place to work?”

It’s: “Does this fit into my actual life?”

Rosee explains: “Work just now happens across so many different settings, like home, coworking spaces. Instead of being like this is my main office, does it really fit into everything that I try to do.”

When billing is confusing, when booking is painful, when the systems feel unreliable, members don’t just get annoyed—they lose trust. As Rosee puts it: “When the system at the coworking space doesn’t feel so reliable, it’s easy to lose that trust a little bit. People do tend to disengage.”

Members are evaluating your space against every other option: home, cafés, libraries, other coworking spaces, client offices. If you make their life harder rather than easier, you lose.

Being Seen Without Being Forced

Rosee learned something from visiting Werkhain in Berlin—a space that transformed a former gym into a fully booked ...

Jerome Chang

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

Jerome Chang started coworking in 2008.

He runs the oldest coworking brand in America. He’s a licensed architect. He also plays aggressive adult slow-pitch softball.

That last part surprised Bernie, too.

Here’s what didn’t surprise him: Jerome stopped going to the big conferences.

In London, over 51% of coworking spaces are owned by operators with one to five locations. Jerome calls them “people in the trenches.” But walk into a major industry conference, and you’ll hear the National President of WeWork talking about strategies for hundreds of sites.

After the top three or four brands—WeWork with around 200 locations, Regus with 1,000, and Premier with 120—everyone else drops to fewer than four locations.

That’s the actual industry.

Nobody was building events for them.

So Jerome built one. The Coworking Operators Weekend. Now in its second year. Rotating through secondary cities: Los Angeles, then Raleigh, then Detroit in 2027, Denver in 2028.

Jackie Latragna handles marketing for Pacific Workplaces and helps organise the event. She came from logistics two years ago and is still shocked at how genuinely helpful people are in this industry. Her takeaway from last year: “You walk away from an event, and you know every single person’s name.”

The conversation goes somewhere uncomfortable too.

Jerome points out that Biznow—a traditional real estate publication serving one of the most conservative industries in America—manages diverse speaker lineups at every event. Coworking, built on community, does worse.

Bernie shares his own awkward moment: telling a conference organiser that 70% of their lineup was men. The response: “The women just don’t call me back.”

Bernie’s answer: “You have to call them more. They’re not hanging around waiting for you to call.”

One attendee last year opened her space within the previous twelve months. She came to confirm she wasn’t doing everything wrong. She brought her dog.

She left knowing she belonged.

⏱ Timeline Highlights

[00:00] Bernie opens with the stat that frames everything: 51% of London coworking is owned by operators with one to five locations

[01:27] Jackie’s introduction: marketing at Pacific Workplaces, wants to be known as an epic baker, got a KitchenAid mixer for Christmas

[01:58] Jerome: started in 2008, oldest coworking brand in America, licensed architect, and “a very greedy bass runner” in adult softball

[02:50] Bernie: “It’s the aggressive part in that sentence that threw me off.”

[03:28] Why Jerome created the summit: big conferences shifted toward macro topics, leaving operators in the trenches

[05:40] Jackie on connexion: “You walk away from an event, and you know every single person’s name.”

[07:25] Jerome: Smaller rooms mean every conversation is accessible, even if you know no one

[09:21] The industry reality: after the top three or four brands, “everyone’s under three or four locations.”

[10:56] Jackie’s most anticipated session: using your space for events as revenue—” I haven’t seen this topic anywhere else.”

[13:07] A new operator came to confirm she was on the right path. She brought her dog. She left knowing she belonged.

[14:13] Jackie on why this industry is different: “Somebody in the room is going to help you, and they’re going to help you genuinely.”

[17:03] Bernie’s COVID memory: the daily Zoom calls where the peacocking operators finally asked for help

[19:13] Jerome’s sharp comparison: Biznow does diversity better than most coworking conferences

[22:15] Bernie’s confrontation with a conference organiser: “The women just don’t call me back.” His response: “You have to call them more.”

[23:16] Jackie: “Maybe they’re just scared to be the first one.”

[24:14] Event details: February 6-7, 2026, Raleigh, North Carolina

The Actual Industry

After the top three or four brands, everyone’s under four locations.

Jerome lays this out plainly. WeWork has around 200 sites. Regus has 1,000. Premier has 120. Then there’s a cliff.

The majority of people running one, two, three spaces are. Bernie adds London data: over 51% of coworking spaces there are owned by operators with one to five locations.

These aren’t hobbyists.

They’re the actual industry—but they’ve become invisible at events designed to attract sponsors and impress investors.

The Operators Weekend exists because someone finally said: the majority are still in the trenches. They deserve content that meets them where they are.

Events as Revenue

Jackie flags something most conferences miss entirely: using your space for public events as a revenue stream.

“I haven’t seen this topic anywhere else,” she says.

The logic is obvious once stated. Meeting rooms sit empty during off-peak hours. Workshops, pop-ups, markets—each represents income and visibility.

But obvious doesn’t mean easy.

How do you price event space without undermining membership? How do you promote to the broader community without alienating members who value quiet?

The Saturday session tackles this directly. For operators watching margins, this could change their financial model.

Why Small Rooms Work

Jerome and Jackie both circle around something counterintuitive: smaller events create better connections.

When you walk into a room of 300 people, existing relationships look like cliques to newcomers. Jerome puts it simply: “Unless you’re very socially outgoing, you’re not breaking into those tight-knit groups.”

In a smaller room, every conversation becomes accessible.

Jackie saw this firsthand last year. She’d spot someone new, learn their background, pull over someone relevant. “Then you just fade into the background after that conversation starts, and you just watch it blossom.”

The choice to rotate through secondary cities—Raleigh, Detroit, Denver—serves the same purpose.

These aren’t glamour destinations. The focus stays on the room, not the location.

The Diversity Problem

Jerome doesn’t soft-pedal this.

He’s watched coworking conferences stay predominantly white and male for years—despite an industry built on community rhetoric. His comparison lands hard: Biznow, a traditional real estate publication serving one of the most conservative industries in America, does better.

“If they can do it, my gosh, we are overdue.”

The problem isn’t just optics. Jerome notes that he—and others—stopped attending certain conferences because they didn’t want to aid the situation by being there.

That’s lost ticket sales for organisers who refuse to change.

Bernie shares his own uncomfortable moment. He pointed out a 70% male lineup to an organiser. The response: “Well, the women just don’t call me back.”

Bernie’s answer: “You have to call them more. They’re not hanging around waiting for yo...

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

That’s Hector Kolonas on AI search strategy.

Not the consultant version. The honest version. The version you get from someone who’s been watching coworking patterns since 2013 — not because he planned it, but because the Cyprus banking crisis wiped out his business overnight.

Banks froze. ATMs stopped. His advertising clients axed his contracts.

What he found himself staring at: empty ad agency offices, Herman Miller chairs gathering dust, and a new class of displaced workers with nowhere to go. So he filled those offices with freelancers. Not as a business plan. As survival.

That’s why he sees fragility where others see trends.

When he talks about the shifts happening in coworking right now, he’s not predicting from a conference stage. He’s pattern-matching against what happens when systems fail. Three shifts are reshaping how people interact with coworking spaces.

Not abstract trends. Real changes happening now.

The first shift

People aren’t choosing a single office anymore.

They’re building an ecosystem of workspaces based on what task they’re trying to complete and what else is happening in their life that day. A coworking space for collaborative work. Home for deep focus. A hotel lobby for client calls.

The question isn’t “Should I join?” It’s “Does this space fit the specific thing I need right now?”

The second shift

Who pays and how billing works is becoming the silent killer.

When employers centralise workspace spending, they gravitate toward spaces that make accounting simple. If your billing creates friction, members stop showing up — not because they don’t love the community, but because finance said no.

This is a power shift disguised as a logistics problem.

The third shift

Discoverability is fragmenting.

Google Maps still matters. But AI search is producing queries so specific that traditional SEO can’t answer them:

“I need a workspace with a podcast studio near Abby’s soccer training on Tuesday afternoons that I can book on a per day basis.”

“I need somewhere quiet to get some deep work done that has great coffee, isn’t too busy on Wednesday mornings and is within five minutes walk of Tottenham Court Road Station.”

That’s what people are typing into OpenAI, Claude, Perplexity, Comet Browser.

If your space can’t be stitched together from Reddit conversations, podcast appearances, and member testimonials, you’re about to become invisible. And invisible doesn’t mean you’re competing with WeWork.

It means you’re competing with someone’s kitchen table.

What else this episode covers

Hector unpacks what “operational AI” actually means.

Not chatbots or content generators, but systems that prompt your team: “This is Bernie’s 200th day pass. He’s coming in tomorrow.” That’s hospitality meeting data. The community manager still decides what to do.

The AI just ensures they know the opportunity exists.

The conversation takes a turn into vibe coding — describing what you want a system to do and having AI build it, without knowing how to code. Bernie asks Hector to explain it “to an eighth grader.”

After a proper answer, Bernie says: “I’m so glad I asked.”

Hector’s warning for operators tempted to chase every AI trend: in the early days of coworking, every space built their own software. Now, many spaces are building their own AI agents and database infrastructure without expert guidance.

They’ll learn the same painful lessons about maintenance, security, and technical debt.

Bernie’s version is blunter: “It’s tempting to solve problems you don’t have yet. You see, I can launch aeroplanes in AI. It’s like you’re a blogger in a three-site coworking company in Birmingham. Stick to what you’re doing.”

By the end, when Hector finishes describing This Week in Coworking — the newsletters, the undercurrents, the games, the leader profiles — Bernie’s response is honest:

“I’m so jealous. Anyway, did I say that out loud?”

If you’ve been wondering whether all the AI talk is hype or something you need to act on, this episode gives you a framework for deciding what matters now versus what to file away for later.

Timeline Highlights

[01:14] Bernie introduces the “second best coworking podcast in the world.” Hector immediately: “How many guests have asked you what the number one podcast is?”

[01:18] “According to all the AI engines, This Week in Coworking is an encyclopaedia for the coworking industry. It’s not how I would have called it, but it’s an interesting way to think about it.”

[02:03] Bernie: “I thought it was earlier than that. I thought it was the economic crash in Cyprus.” Hector: “Yeah, that was in 2013, man.”

[03:07] The ecosystem shift: “This idea that you don’t have to be in a specific physical place to achieve a task, but there are physical spaces that make certain tasks easier to achieve.”

[06:01] The billing reality: “The easier it is to access the space from a billing perspective... is changing how people interact with space. They’re leaning towards the ones that are easier to pay.”

[07:32] The AI prompt that should worry you: “I need somewhere quiet to get some deep work done that has great coffee, isn’t too busy on Wednesday mornings and is within five minutes walk of Tottenham Court Road Station.”

[09:49] The anti-b******t moment: “Anyone who tells you to have this little bit of code, do this, is lying. Nobody knows exactly how to optimise towards it, but good fundamentals is what we are recommending right now.”

[14:01] The hospitality AI enables: “Being told that this is Bernie’s 200th day pass, he’s coming in tomorrow... there is so much you can do with the right hospitality hat on.”

[15:51] Vibe coding explained: “I can tell it, I need this outcome, and I’m not really fussed about how you do it.”

[20:47] Bernie on AI search: “I’ve had the luxury of hanging around Koffi since it all started... that Gemini enterprise thing, it surfaces so much from my Google Drive, which is now 15 years old.”

[24:22] Where to start: “What is the frog you would want to eat first? Or what is the thing that you have to do every day that puts that pain in your stomach? Automate that first.”

[27:02] Bernie’s warning: “It’s tempting to solve problems you don’t have yet. You see, I can launch aeroplanes in AI. It’s like you’re a blogger in a three-site coworking company in Birmingham. Stick to what you’re doing.”

[34:06] After Hector describes everything TWIC has become, Bernie: “I’m so jealous. Anyway, did I say that out loud?”

Why Nobody’s Choosing One Office Anymore

The first shift Hector describes isn’t about hybrid work policies.

It’s about how people mentally map their working lives. Pre-pandemic, most desk workers had one office. Post-pandemic, the narrative became “office versus home.”

But what’s actually emerging is more fluid.

An ecosystem where different spaces serve different purposes depending o...

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

Ewan Buck has been working on Contingent Works since 2018. The space opened on Bromley High Street in late 2020, weeks before England’s second lockdown.

For the first four years, the council didn’t get it.

Not because they were hostile. Because they’d never seen what a coworking space actually does. They work in dull corporate offices. They don’t know what it looks like when freelancers and micro-businesses find each other, share leads, and build something together.

So Ewan did what Gerald from a Brixton coworking assembly told him worked: he educated them. Slowly. Persistently. For four years.

He dragged councillors into the space. He introduced them to members. He let them see faces light up over laptop screens on a Friday afternoon when central London offices sat empty.

Then the personnel changed. Someone new arrived in the department and asked the obvious question: “Oh, you’ve got a coworking space on the high street? That’s really handy.”

Once the penny dropped, they were super helpful.

Now Contingent Works runs an accelerator programme with Goldsmiths University. Ten scaling companies get monthly mentoring. Regular networking events bring local businesses together. The MP is scheduled to visit in February.

But here’s the part that stopped Bernie mid-conversation:

A member, Jack, wrote to the MP. Without telling Ewan. Without being asked.

“I don’t know why you’re not here. I don’t know why you don’t support this place. It’s absolutely brilliant. I couldn’t work without this place.”

The parliamentary office responded.

That’s what four years of patient, connected, ecosystem-minded work actually produces. Not just a profitable space. A space that people fight for.

Timeline Highlights

[01:34] “I like to be known as a connector, someone who connects people together.”

[02:20] Bromley’s identity: London borough since ‘68, but “the post office couldn’t be bothered to change all the codes.”

[04:23] Why “Contingent Works”: “We wanted to align ourselves with disruptors that embrace the new.”

[05:49] The toilet wall photo and Simon Barker’s response: “I’ve made it from the gutter to the toilet.”

[07:04] How Ewan met his co-founder, Stephen, at the school gates of David Bowie’s old primary school. “We sat in all the chairs, hoping it might be in the same chair.”

[09:56] Discovering Soho Radio: “Someone must have thought this is a great idea. I’m just going to do it.”

[11:34] On London changing: “Cities always change... Maybe people take fewer risks. I don’t know.”

[14:45] Gerald’s lesson from Brixton: “It wasn’t because they weren’t listening – it was because they weren’t educated.”

[14:55] “Once that penny drops, they’re super helpful.”

[16:11] What the council partnership produced: “An accelerator hub with Goldsmith University... a really tight cohort of 10 companies that are all scaling.”

[17:33] “That took four years. More importantly, it took a change of leadership in the council.”

[18:15] “You need a backer. You need an advocate in the council to help you.”

[18:54] The method: “You have to drag them, kicking and screaming, into your space.”

[19:30] GLA team visiting on a Friday: “Oh, this is where all the people from London work.”

[22:24] Jack writes to the MP: “I don’t know why you’re not here... He did that off his own back.”

[25:30] High street reality: “2019 was the worst retail year ever... they’re going ‘Oh, we’re nearly at 2019 levels’ – forgetting that it was terrible”

[26:54] The infrastructure case: “Every single bus going through Bromley stops opposite our building.”

[29:45] What success means: “It only really works if everything around you is successful as well.”

[30:45] “You can’t just live in isolation.”

Identity as Connector

When Bernie asks what Ewan wants to be known for, he doesn’t say “successful business owner” or “coworking operator.” He says: “A connector. Someone who connects people together.”

This isn’t branding. It’s how he moves through the world. He works with the council “quite a lot” because it lets him meet other groups of people. He introduces people “in a positive way.” His value isn’t the desks – it’s the relationships.

Deep Local Roots

Ewan didn’t parachute into Bromley as a developer. He lives there. His kids go to school there. He met his co-founder Stephen at the school gates, where they discovered David Bowie had also been a pupil.

“We sat in all the chairs, hoping it might be in the same chair.”

That’s not a businessman. That’s a neighbour. And neighbours think differently about what a high street needs.

Learning From the Community

The breakthrough insight came from Gerald at a coworking assembly event in Brixton. Ewan went. He listened. Gerald explained that councils aren’t hostile – they’re uneducated. “You have to educate your councillor. They don’t understand. They don’t know what a coworker is.”

Ewan took that lesson and applied it for four years.

This is what coworking assemblies and peer networks are for. Not just moral support – tactical intelligence from people who’ve already made the mistakes.

Physical Presence as Strategy

The method is specific and replicable:

“You have to drag them, kicking and screaming, into your space. They work in an extremely dull corporate environment. It’s a council office. They’re never glamorous. They walk into somewhere like Contingent and go, ‘Oh, right. Wow. These people work here. This is amazing. It’s like a hotel lobby.”

Then, introduce them to members. Let them see what actually happens. Let them feel the energy.

The GLA team walked in on a Friday and said, “Oh, this is where all the people from London work.” That’s the moment understanding shifts.

Finding Your Advocate

Ewan is clear about what made the difference:

“More importantly, it actually took a change of leadership in the council. Not the top leaders, but in that department. It took a change of personnel in that department for someone new to come in and go, ‘Oh, you’ve got coworking space in the high street. That’s really handy.’”

And once you find that person:

“You need a backer. You need an advocate in the council to help you. As long as you can get in there and educate them, it should be a reciprocal relationship. It has proved so, so far.”

The lesson: keep educating. Keep showing up. The right person will eventually arrive.

Creating a Space Members Fight For

Jack didn’t write to the MP because Ewan asked him to. He wrote because the space mattered enough to him that he couldn’t understand why it wasn’t recognised.

“I don’t know why you’re not here. I don’t know why you don’t support this place. It’s absolutely brilliant. I couldn’t work without this place.”

You can’t manufacture that. You can only create conditions where it happens: a space so good, so connected to people’s working lives, that they advocate without being asked.

Ecosystem Thinking

Bernie asks what Ewan hopes for 2026. He doesn’t say “profitability” or “growth.” He says:

“You want things to turn over and be settled... But it only really works if everything around you is s...

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

David Walker is back on the podcast, and this time he’s got a provocation that might sting.

That indie coffee shop you love? The one where you spend eight hours nursing a single flat white, running speed tests on their wifi, hunting for the corner seat with the working plug socket?

It could have been a coworking space. Should have been, perhaps.

The ingredients were all there: the energy, the ambient productivity, the regulars who recognise each other but never speak because it’s against social norms. What was missing was a membership model and a barista willing to connect people instead of just pulling shots.

In our first conversation back in August, David talked about the bias towards design over engagement — how spaces get the aesthetics right but miss the human facilitation that makes community actually happen. This episode picks up that thread and runs with it: what does intentional community facilitation look like when you strip away the fancy furniture?

David has been in coworking since 2008, back when Conjunctured was a refurbished house in East Austin with beer in the vending machine. He’s watched the industry grow from grassroots movement to asset class. He’s always working between two worlds — the grassroots ethos in one side of his brain, the future evolution of the industry in the other.

This time, he’s looking backwards and forwards simultaneously.

Backwards: to the coffee shop owners who watched laptop warriors colonise their tables without ever figuring out how to monetise them. Who posted “no wifi” signs and two-hour table limits instead of building the community hub they were accidentally creating.

Forwards: to how AI might be the “permission slip” that lets small operators embrace the complexity of hybrid models.

Bernie’s been thinking about this too. There’s a café in Vigo where he’s got a sticker on his phone to show his commitment. It looks like a coworking space. It functions like a coworking space. But the people in there would never call it that.

There’s something in that gap between what we call things and what they actually are.

The conversation spirals into territory that matters right now — especially for UK operators watching the business rates crisis unfold. If your model isn’t sustainable, you’re vulnerable. And sustainable doesn’t just mean profitable. It means generative. Building something that creates value for everyone in the room, not just extracting rent from them.

What David loved about the original coworking world was precisely this: it was a business with an element of social activism. A sustainable model that enabled community. The Cluetrain Manifesto’s “markets are conversations” made real in a room where people actually talked to each other.

The episode closes where all the best coworking conversations do: with a reminder that talking to AI all day will get you high on your own fumes. This is when we need to be talking to other coworking people in our area. Get together. Maintain that human connection.

This conversation touches something fundamental to why the Coworking Values Podcast exists: the belief that Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability aren’t nice-to-haves but the actual point.

Uncertain times. Exciting times. A jungle out there.

Timeline Highlights

[00:04] Bernie announces Unreasonable Connection going live on 24th February in London — tickets on sale in January

[01:37] David on bridging two worlds: “always having the ethos of the grassroots mindset in one side of my brain and the future evolution of the industry in the other”

[02:28] The provocation: “if coffee shops could have innovated a bit, the coworking industry might have never even happened”

[04:43] Bernie’s pricing puzzle: “How do I charge? Is it like you can only sit here if you’ve got a membership?”

[06:31] David on the business model wall: “You saw these coffee shops struggle with this new influx of a new type of customer, but they could never figure out how to properly monetize the customer”

[08:05] The disconnect: “the average user of a coffee shop has never been a member at a coworking space”

[11:57] The unlock: “if a barista was at an hour or two out of the day, almost like a light community manager where they tried to introduce people or catalyse conversations”

[13:33] David’s blueprint: “one phone booth, some external monitors, reliable power, a membership fee for free drip coffee, and a barista who cared to connect people — there, you got a new business model”

[17:17] AI as permission slip: “open up Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT and tell it everything about your business and say, How do I get from point A to point B? It’s going to have a plan”

[20:37] Bernie’s shock: “I was shocked at how many people where they used AI was like spell check in a newsletter”

[21:50] The hard truth: “at the end of the day, if it’s not going to create more money in the door, then it’s just a volunteer effort”

[24:17] David on what made coworking special: “it was a business, a quote, unquote business. But it had this element of social activism... we were enabling community through a sustainable business model”

[27:03] The vision: “A business owner or a coworking space owner has the ability to build a microeconomy in their own coworking space”

[29:15] Bernie’s closing wisdom: “this now more than ever is when we should be talking to other coworking space owners and community people in our area”

The Coffee Shop That Almost Was

Walk into any indie coffee shop and you’ll see the ghost of what coworking could have become.

There’s the guy who’s been here since opening, laptop slowly murdering his thighs, running speed tests every hour. There’s the woman who recognises the regulars but hasn’t spoken to any of them because that’s not what you do in a café. There’s the owner watching their tables occupied by people spending a tenner over eight hours, unable to turn them for the lunch rush.

David calls this the coffee shop’s collision with the wifi revolution. He remembers when not every café had wifi, when you had to scout for plug access like a detective. Now the infrastructure exists everywhere, but the business model never evolved to match.

Coffee shops had everything the coworking movement wanted. The energy. The ambient productivity. The sense of being around other humans doing their own thing. What they lacked was intentionality — a membership model, a mechanism for connection, a way to monetise the all-day laptop warriors without resorting to passive-aggressive “no laptops” signs.

Bernie sees this playing out in Vigo right now. His friend’s café has a huge event space upstairs. He keeps trying to convince Josh to put a big table up there, add some monitors, create a coworking area. The blueprint is obvious. But there’s that gap between knowing what could work and actually building it.

The ingredients were all there. The recipe was never written.

The Barista as L...

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

Karen Tait’s electricity bill has tripled in four years.

The reality of running an independent coworking space in 2025 is about to get worse.Karen founded The Residence in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, after years of commuting to London while affordability kept pushing her further out. She went from investment banking to building the kind of space she desperately needed: a place where small business owners could find energy, support, validation, and community—not just desks and Wi-Fi.

She knows both worlds. The City, and the country lane.

Now, a single policy change threatens to undo it all.

The UK’s business rates reclassification—specifically the stripping of Small Business Rates Relief from private offices within coworking spaces—could force operators like Karen into an impossible choice: absorb costs they can’t afford, pass them on to members who don’t deserve the hit, or close.

The same policy that strips relief from Karen’s members gives breaks to distribution warehouses on the edge of town.

This episode is part of our ongoing series on the business rates crisis, following conversations with Jane Sartin from FlexSA and Roland Stanley from Dragon Coworking.

What makes Karen’s perspective essential is what she reveals about the hidden economic engine that coworking creates.

The Residence doesn’t just provide workspace.

It provides infrastructure for 150 members who would otherwise be scattered across home offices and coffee shops. It sources everything locally—coffee beans from Saffron Walden, cleaning services, IT support, catering—all within Hertfordshire.

Every pound spent circulates through the local economy rather than vanishing into Amazon’s supply chain.

Bernie cites research from an Islington Council social value impact report: for every £1 spent with a local business, that pound circulates through the local economy four times.

When money goes to national chains, it disappears.

Bernie asks about the hidden costs of running physical space—and Karen doesn’t flinch. She’s started being more vocal about the actual running costs.

It’s eye-watering, she says.

This is a very lean business, incredibly lean.

Every price rise, every vacancy, every increase in employment costs is a strain. And now this whole threat to how rates will be applied to the building... it really could be the final blow.

The episode isn’t all grim.

Karen shares how she’s fighting back—meeting with her local MP Josh, working with Jane at FlexSA, and refusing to accept that everyone else will deal with it.

If you run an independent coworking space in the UK, this episode is essential listening.

If you use one, it’s time to understand what’s at stake.

Timeline Highlights

[00:00] Bernie sets the scene: “The value it has to the local area is way beyond desks and WiFi.”

[01:42] Karen’s origin story: “The Residence” was born out of my own selfish needs of needing a place to work.”

[02:27] The energy you can’t bottle: “A level playing field for small business owners, a place where startup dreams can happen together.”

[04:01] Location context: “We’re actually on a farm development, a little bit tucked away down a country lane, but in the middle of our housing estate.”

[06:26] Why face-to-face support matters: “Connecting with all the businesses that are in your community who perhaps can cross-pollinate.”

[08:03] The Amazon boycott: “We will not use Amazon. We will work with people in our community to supply everything that we need.”

[08:03] Cross-pollination in action: “Lighting engineers working with interior designers, small business owners working with the VAs in our space, estate agents working with the local videographer.”

[09:41] The £200 challenge: “If every single person who lived in Bishop Stortford spent £200 on their local high street, their local high street could survive.”

[11:23] The reality of rates: “Whilst building valuations are going up, the rates multiplier is coming down, which means a higher bill, bottom line.”

[12:58] The electricity shock: “My electricity bill over the four years here at Bishop Stortford has tripled in price”

[13:49] The breaking point: “It’s just being penalising the system, penalising the very people that are the backbone of this country.”

[15:39] The truth: “This is not a highly profitable business. This is a very lean business, incredibly lean.”

[17:33] Taking action: “That’s talking to our local MP, engaging with Jane at Flexer... sometimes you just have to”

[22:48] The stakes: “The Residence” as a whole has 150 members. If The Residence closes, that’s going to be 150 people that suddenly have no space.”

[25:29] The beating heart: “We gave up a lot of space at the residence for a beating heart, the big kitchen area.”

[29:28] The closing philosophy: “If we can make people feel like anything is possible, anything is solvable, together... We can find a way together.”

Karen Built The Residence Because Nothing Like It Existed

Karen describes something that sounds almost utopian until you realise it’s just thoughtful design.

Dropping children off at school. Parking outside. Going for lunch in the café. Doing a workout. All woven seamlessly around a workspace.

The Residence sits on a farm development in Bishop’s Stortford—a market town of about 40,000 people, tucked down a country lane but surrounded by a café, gym, beauticians, and other businesses.

It’s intentional infrastructure for the way modern life actually works.

This “five-minute life cycle” isn’t about luxury.

It’s about making entrepreneurship accessible to people who can’t afford to disappear on a three-hour daily commute to London.

Karen lived that commute herself. She moved from the Docklands to Epping to Bishop’s Stortford as affordability kept pushing her further out—but she was still commuting back every day.

The space she built isn’t theoretical.

It’s the answer to a problem she lived.

The Residence Banned Amazon Two Years Ago

A couple of years ago, Karen made a decision that sounds radical but shouldn’t be.

The Residence would not use Amazon.

Everything they need—food, cleaning supplies, coffee, IT support, engineering, health and safety—comes from businesses within Hertfordshire.

When you spend with local suppliers, that money stays in circulation. When you pay with national or international chains, it leaves the community immediately.

Karen’s approach is intentional. She’d love to document what it physically looks like in terms of cash, because she thinks that, without realising it, you’re having an impact on the local community by spending your money.

But you have to be intentional about that.

The cross-pollination happens daily.

Lighting engineers working with interior designers. Small business owners are working with the VAs in the space. Estate agents are working with the local videographer.

When your members’ businesses grow, they need more services. When local businesses thrive, they need workspace. The interdependence is structural.

Business Rates Are Complicated — Here’s What Actually Matters

The business ra...

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

This isn’t a warning about something that might happen.

It’s already happening. Two operators have received six-figure backdated bills. The letters arrived without warning. The amounts are payable now.

Jane Sartin is the Executive Director of the Flexible Space Association. She’s spent this year in rooms with ministers, civil servants, and treasury officials trying to stop a policy change that could wipe out independent workspace operators across the country.

The fight has been going on longer than you know.

In 2023, the same issue emerged. FlexSA resolved it quietly behind the scenes — most of the industry never even knew. Then it came back in spring 2024. This time, ministers kept batting Jane back to the VOA. “It’s a technical matter for the agency,” they said. “Not a political decision for government.”

So Jane went public.

Here’s what’s working: the minister has acknowledged the pressure. “I am aware of this,” he’s told people. “I know. I’ve had a number of letters.”

The letters are landing. The campaign is having an effect.

But the power of Jane’s ministerial meeting next week depends entirely on how many more letters arrive before she walks into that room. One email gets ignored. Fifty emails from operators in the same constituency? That’s a political problem that demands a response.

This episode tells you exactly what’s happening and what to do about it.

Timeline Highlights

[00:02] “Your workspace is under attack. Might be a little bit dramatic for this, but...”

[01:26] “We exist to represent the industry. We operate as a membership body, but we play a wider role than that.”

[02:57] “What they are doing is stopping the individual assessment of serviced offices and assessing the whole building or floor... as a single hereditament.”

[04:20] “Talking publicly about potentially businesses based in serviced offices no longer being eligible for reliefs... could clearly spook customers.”

[05:41] “We realised we were going to have to start bringing their attention to it by making more public noise about it.”

[06:12] “I’m currently aware of two operators on the smaller size that have been handed £400,000 backdated bills.”

[07:41] “It’s horribly complicated. I’ve learned a lot, even just this year, but by no means am I an expert.”

[09:03] “FlexSA currently has commissioned some economic value research, which is being finalised at the moment.”

[11:14] “If people haven’t already, I would definitely encourage them to write to their MP.”

[12:43] “I’m a big believer in trying to keep things succinct... ideally, you don’t really want to be going to more than a page of A4.”

[14:19] “He said, I am aware of this. I know. I’ve had a number of letters on this.”

[18:41] “Being able to say this isn’t just a theoretical thing that might happen, it’s something that’s already happening. It’s really important.”

[19:33] “I’m absolutely aware of operators that have had expansion plans but have put those on hold... the current uncertainty is putting them off.”

[23:10] “Don’t feel like that’s a deadline because as much as I’d love to think that one meeting is going to fix it, realistically, I suspect it’s not.”

They Tried This Before — It’s Back

This is the second time FlexSA has fought this exact battle.

In 2023, the same issue emerged. Jane worked to resolve it quietly, behind the scenes. It worked. The problem went away. Most of the industry never even knew how close they’d come.

Then it came back in spring 2024.

This time, quiet diplomacy hit a wall. Jane spent months in meetings, making the case privately. The response from ministers? “This is a matter for the VOA.” The message was clear: we’re not getting involved.

That’s how systems protect themselves.

The agency makes the decision. The politicians refuse responsibility. The operators are left holding bills they can’t pay. After months of being batted back, Jane made the call to go public.

It carries risk — talking openly about members potentially losing their rates relief could spook customers.

But staying quiet wasn’t working.

What the VOA Is Actually Doing

The Valuation Office Agency assesses properties for business rates.

Historically, individual offices within a serviced workspace have been assessed separately. Small businesses occupying those offices can claim Small Business Rates Relief — often paying nothing.

The VOA now wants to assess entire floors or buildings as single units.

One assessment. One massive bill. Landing entirely on the operator. This strips relief from the small businesses inside the space. It removes the operator’s ability to claim empty rates relief on unoccupied units.

The backdating element makes this existential.

The VOA can apply these changes back to April 2023. An operator who thought their rates situation was settled could receive a letter tomorrow demanding two years of payments they never budgeted for.

Jane knows of operators who’ve already received bills of around £400,000.

For a small independent workspace, that’s not a problem to be solved.

That’s “business destroying” — her words.

Why Operators Have Been Reluctant to Speak Up

Bernie asks the question many people are thinking: why haven’t we heard more about this?

Jane’s answer is bracingly honest.

Talking publicly about your members potentially losing their rates relief could drive customers to competitors. In a market where trust and stability matter, admitting vulnerability feels dangerous.

There’s also the hope factor.

When the issue was resolved quietly in 2023, many operators assumed the same approach would work again. Why make noise when diplomacy might deliver?

But diplomacy has limits.

When ministers refuse to engage, when the VOA keeps insisting this is just technical implementation rather than policy choice, the only remaining option is political pressure.

That pressure only works if MPs hear from the people in their constituencies who are affected.

What Actually Works When Writing to Your MP

FlexSA has created a toolkit to help operators contact their MPs.

But Jane is clear about what separates an email that gets filed from one that gets action.

Keep it local.

MPs care about their constituency. The number of businesses you support, the number of people who work from your space, the local economic contribution — that’s what cuts through.

Keep it short.

One page of A4, maximum. “If they have to turn the page, you’ve lost them.”

Don’t copy-paste.

FlexSA provides template letters, but using them word-for-word backfires. When an MP receives twenty identical emails, they stop reading.

Make a specific ask.

Invite them to visit your space. Ask them to write to the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury. Request that they submit written parliamentary questions.

Here’s the proof it works.

The minister has already told people he’s aware of the issue because of the letters he’s received. More letters increase the pressure.

Why Suppliers Should Get Involved Too

The ...

“If these people have their own little standalone office somewhere, if they literally picked their office up and went to put it on the street outside, they would qualify for small business rates relief. But just because they’ve had the audacity to come and get an office in a coworking space, they’re going to lose that benefit.” - Roland Stanley

Unreasonable Connection Going Live! London, February 2026.

🎟️ Tickets go on sale in January 2026.

The entire day is co-created by the coworking community builders on the co-creation waitlist.

Roland Stanley is angry. Not performatively angry. Not LinkedIn-post angry. Actually angry.

The founder of Dragon Coworking in Rochester, Kent, has spent eight years building something real in a part of England that doesn’t make the tourism brochures.

He trained as a chef at Canterbury College, grafted in kitchens across France and London, then came home to help his dad run the St. George Hotel “for two weeks” — and stayed 20 odd years.

When a spare function room sat empty and eating business rates, someone mentioned coworking. Roland went up to London, saw what was possible, and asked a question that still drives him: Why can’t this work in Medway?

Dragon Coworking was born in 2017. The name came from a friend’s suggestion — St. George Hotel, St. George and the Dragon. It stuck.

What also stuck was Roland’s hospitality instinct: make people feel welcome, build relationships before asking for anything, treat your members like they’re part of something rather than just paying the bills.

But now that something is under threat. Then the Valuation Office Agency sent a letter.

The VOA has begun reclassifying coworking spaces in a way that strips Small Business Rate Relief from the micro-businesses inside them. Roland calls it an “extinction-level event” — and he’s not being dramatic.

In this episode, Bernie and Roland dig into what’s actually happening with the VOA reclassification, why the government is using an ATM legal precedent to justify treating freelancers like cash machines, and what the coworking industry needs to do right now to fight back.

Roland has already secured a meeting with his local MP, Lauren Edwards. Jane Sartin from FlexSA has a meeting with the relevant Minister in the diary. But they need numbers. They need noise. They need you.

If you run an independent coworking space, work from one, or supply software to them: this episode is your call to action.

Timeline Highlights

[00:00] Bernie’s urgent intro: “This is possibly the best opportunity I’ve seen for the whole UK coworking industry to unite.”

[02:06] Roland on what he wants to be known for: “Helping make people’s lives better. In a small way, that’s what I’d like to be known for.”

[02:17] Bernie’s warmth: “I think you’re doing okay. Whenever I mention your name, most people react quite positively.”

[02:53] The origin story: a spare function room at his dad’s hotel that was “eating business rates and just empty all the time.”

[03:54] Why it’s called Dragon: “St. George Hotel, so St. George and the Dragon. That’s where it originally came from.”

[04:16] Roland’s kitchen credentials: Canterbury College, City & Guilds, France for six months, then the London Clinic

[08:33] The authenticity principle: “Run a business that’s a reflection of who you are. Don’t try to run a false business.”

[11:07] How Dragon builds local perks without apps and gimmicks: “We’ll start liking their posts, get to know each other first, then go down and visit them.”

[12:04] The local economy philosophy: “We don’t want a discount. Perhaps just a bit of added value, like a free garlic bread at the local pizza place.”

[14:21] The “indie gang” of coworking operators: Teresa, Ewan, Karen, and John meeting up to share what’s working

[15:30] The one rule: “We’ve got a bit of an informal rule that we’re not allowed to talk about mugs in the sink.”

[18:12] Roland breaks down the VOA threat: offices that would qualify for relief on the street lose it “just because they’ve had the audacity” to join a coworking space

[19:02] The ATM precedent: “They’re trying to treat our members like ATMs.”

[19:47] Roland names it: “Extinction level event.”

[24:46] The immediate action: “Literally, Jane has done a wonderful toolkit about what to do.”

[25:20] Bernie’s challenge to software companies: “Perhaps all the software companies that we all spend lots of money with could help us out by shouting about it as well.”

Thematic Breakdown

The Chef Who Built a Kitchen for Freelancers

Roland Stanley came to coworking through the pass.

City & Guilds training at Canterbury College. Six months working in kitchens in France. A stint at the London Clinic. Eight years total in professional kitchens before he “managed to escape.” Hospitality isn’t a metaphor for Roland. It’s muscle memory. The instinct to make someone feel welcome, to exceed expectations without being asked, to read a room and respond.

When he describes how Dragon builds relationships with local businesses for their perks programme, you can hear the kitchen logic.

No cold outreach. No transactional asks. “We’ll start liking their posts, get to know each other first, then go down and visit them... quite often they’ll come to us and say, can we do something for you?”

That’s just how you treat people when you’ve spent years reading a dining room.

The Name You Remember

Bernie opens the episode, declaring Dragon Coworking “the best name for a coworking space ever in the world.” He’s not wrong.

The origin is accidental. Roland was going to call it “River Coworking” because it overlooked the River Medway. A friend pointed out the obvious: you’re inside the St. George Hotel. St. George and the Dragon. Done.

In a sector full of forgettable compounds — [Location] Works, [Something] Hub, The [Noun] — Dragon Coworking sticks. The name came from a friend’s offhand suggestion. That’s the story. And eight years later, it’s still the thing people remember.

The Indie Gang: What Real Peer Support Looks Like

One of the most valuable sections of this episode has nothing to do with business rates.

Roland describes how a small group of independent coworking operators — Teresa from Collaborate, Ewan, Karen from The Residence, and John from Freedom Works — started meeting up regularly.

No mastermind fees. No ten-grand-a-month coaching programme. Just dinner, conversation, and one rule: “We’re not allowed to talk about mugs in the sink.”

They share what’s working. They troubleshoot problems together. They’ve had “real lightbulb moments.” And crucially, they meet in person a couple of times a year while maintaining a WhatsApp group in between.

Reach out to the spaces in your area. Have a coffee. You’ll learn more than any course can teach you.

The Extinction-Level Event

Now to the reason Bernie opened this episode with unusual urgency.

The Valuation Office Agency (VOA) has begun reclassifying coworking and serviced office spaces. Under the old model, individual offices within a space could be separately rated — meaning the small businesses inside them could claim Small Business Rate Relief (SBRR).

Under the new approach, the VOA treats the entire space as a single “hereditament,” making the operator liable for the building’s entire rates and removing SBRR fro...

Unreasonable Connection Going Live! London, February 2026.

🎟️ Tickets go on sale in January 2026.

The entire day is co-created by the coworking community builders on the co-creation waitlist.

Forty thousand (ish) coworking spaces exist worldwide.

One hundred and twenty of them offer childcare.

Georgia Norton spent 2025 tracking them down. She interviewed founders from Sydney to Washington State, Berlin, and Athens. She pored over floor plans, took virtual tours, and visited spaces in person across the US.

She found the operational models, yes.

But she also found the graveyard—roughly forty more that tried and couldn’t make it work.

Georgia worked with Playhood in Crouch End, North London. A micro-nursery integrated with a coworking space.

Children aged 18 months to five years old learned and played while their parents worked nearby. Karen Partcher, the founder, had renovated a Victorian terrace house to create a 34-square-metre studio in the garden.

Eight children maximum. One neighbourhood. Deep roots.

Her research, published on 17 December 2025 through the US think tank New America, reveals something uncomfortable.

The glossy, high-end childcare-coworking experiments all folded. The Wing. The Jane Club. Second Home. Even Impact Hub couldn’t sustain it.

The settings that survived weren’t private-equity-backed family clubs in central business districts. They were neighbourhood-scale operations run by mums who refused to choose between career and proximity to their children.

Every founder Georgia interviewed was a mother.

Every one of them had reached a point where the existing system—commute to work, outsource childcare to a distant silo, pretend you don’t have kids during business hours—stopped making sense.

Bernie brings his own memory to this. When his son was born, the only coworking space with childcare he could find in London was Shazia Mustafa’s Third Door. Getting from Ilford to Putney with a pushchair felt like a bridge too far.

The geography of exclusion. The exhaustion of separation.

Timeline Highlights

[00:04] Bernie frames the episode: “She’s tracked down 100 coworking spaces around the world that have some form of childcare and coworking offering.”

[01:21] Georgia on what she’s known for: “Saying, ‘But what if?’ and ‘Have you met so and so?’”

[02:28] The New America report announcement: “December 17th, this think tank called New America is publishing my report.”

[05:00] The numbers that matter: “120 operational right now... I stumbled across the graveyard, if you will, of about another 40 settings that had experimented with the model and not found it sustainable.”

[08:42] Georgia on the core problem: “When you have a kid, your relationship to your work will change. There’s no way to insulate your worlds, to keep them separate forever.”

[11:17] The research finding that stopped Bernie: “Interestingly, in the research, all of the founders were mums.”

[13:50] The design philosophy: “You can’t give everything to everyone all the time.”

[18:38] Georgia’s conviction: “I wholeheartedly think that colocating care with spaces to develop our workforce and to explore our careers and to defend remote working are transformative at the neighbourhood level.”

[21:05] The graveyard of corporate attempts: “Places like The Wing and the Jane Club and big employer initiatives, they quietly folded away this option.”

[24:02] Pandemic communities that thrived: “During the pandemic, we thrived as a little micro-community. We set up community dynamics that sustain us now.”

[27:05] The design revelation: “That boundary wasn’t like a strong doorway that no one was allowed across. It was this really permeable threshold.”

[29:38] Children's understanding work: “They would tap, tap on a fake laptop because they knew... these kids know what their parents do for a living.”

[34:17] The barrier nobody talks about: “The whole Ofsted context is really intimidating... We’ve made it really hard to try and design the type of settings we want for our kids.”

[35:56] The research gap: “There’s just no research being done on this model.”

[40:08] Where to find Georgia’s work: “At our website, playhood.club”

The Graveyard Nobody Talks About

Georgia found roughly forty childcare-coworking spaces that had closed.

Not struggling. Closed.

The pattern was unmistakable. The high-end experiments folded. The Wing tried it. Jane Club tried it. Second Home tried it.

Big-employer initiatives from Yahoo to Patagonia to Goldman Sachs in the 1990s sought to bolt childcare into corporate workspaces.

They all quietly removed the option.

Different reasons—cost centres, zoning regulations, the sheer difficulty of bridging two different regulatory frameworks—but the same outcome. The spaces that survived weren’t in central business districts. They weren’t funded by private equity. They weren’t trying to serve everyone.

Bernie put it bluntly during the conversation: childcare and coworking for the one per cent.

The big shiny spaces in the centre of town, where housing a child costs the price of a small car every month. Georgia’s research confirms they’re not sustainable.

What works is neighbourhood-scale integration. True integration, not bolt-on amenities.

Spaces where childcare workers use the coworking facilities to get their teaching licences or start side businesses. Where parents’ careers become part of the children’s learning—a doctor parent visits to talk about their work, a civil engineer grandad explains what they do.

The Permeable Threshold

The design insight that changed how Georgia understands these spaces: the boundary between work and childcare doesn’t need to be a hard wall.

At Playhood, Karen Partcher renovated a Victorian terrace house. It looks like every other house on the street. But in the garden, she created a 34-square-metre studio. Purpose-built at a child scale.

The threshold wasn’t a door that stayed closed.

It was permeable. Parents visible. Children aware. Staff flow between spaces.

Georgia found this pattern in settings across the world. The assumption that children must be hidden for serious work to happen got blown out of the water when she actually visited and interviewed founders.

Children in these spaces grow up knowing what their parents do for a living.

They see work happening. They tap on fake laptops because they understand the rhythm. Georgia finds this sociologically fascinating—what happens to a generation’s relationship with work when they grow up understanding you can defend the right to work on your own terms, in your own neighbourhood?

The parents change, too.

Georgia mentioned an unpublished post she wrote: an apology to schools. Because families who experience this level of integration come to expect collaboration with everyone who cares for their children.

Traditional school feels jarring after that.

The Pandemic Catalyst

The pandemic tore down the wall between work and care for millions of families.

Children walked in on Zoom calls. The discourse focused frustratingly on working from home as a blanket term, as though everyone could stay in their houses.

Georgia points to something different.

The pandemic catalysed a new wave of founders—predominantly women—who discovered how difficult it was to work and care in the same room and decided they didn’t want to compromise anymore.

These weren’t people building amenity lists for membership tiers.

They were mothers who ha...

Unreasonable Connection Going Live! London, February 2026.

🎟️ Tickets go on sale in January 2026.

The entire day is co-created by the coworking community builders on the co-creation waitlist.

Peter Block doesn’t give keynotes anymore. Not really.

He asks people to move the chairs.

That’s the work. Move them out of rows. Put them in circles. Watch the room change.

Peter is the author of Community: The Structure of Belonging—a book that’s shaped how thousands of coworking operators think about what they’re actually building. He’s spent decades working with corporations and Cincinnati neighbourhoods, slowly dismantling our addiction to the market economy and replacing it with something older: the creative economy.

Not “creative” as in artsy. Creative, as in we make things together.

In this conversation, Bernie digs into what that actually means for anyone running a coworking space. Because Peter doesn’t see your space as real estate. He sees it as a “convening possibility”—a place where strangers might discover they’re not alone, not crazy, and that there’s nothing wrong with them.

The market economy wants you to be a consumer. Buy the membership. Use the wifi. Complain when expectations aren’t met.

The creative economy wants you to be a citizen. Create the culture. Connect the strangers. Build something you can’t purchase.

Bernie brings his usual questions about what this means practically—how do you actually invite people to something they care about? What’s the difference between entertainment and experience? Why does sitting in circles change everything?

Peter’s answer cuts to the bone: “Your coworking spaces, the way you do them, are designed for liberation, not for productivity. Do I want you to be productive? Yes, but that’s the easy part. The hard part is to create culture and space for liberation.”

If you’ve read Community and wondered how to apply it, this is your next step.

If you’ve never read it, consider this your invitation.

Timeline Highlights

[00:04] Bernie sets up why Peter Block matters: “A lot of people in coworking have referenced Community, the Structure of Belonging.”

[02:31] Peter on what he’d like to be known for: “Loving uncertainty, gratitude, being kind from time to time.”

[03:59] The question that unlocks everything: “How do they get into the neighbourhood?”

[05:36] Why Black Friday tells us everything wrong with the market economy: “It was named Black because that’s when the retail stores start to make money.”

[06:44] Bernie tells the Contingent Works story—punks, David Bowie’s school, the Blitz Club, and a carpet shop in Bromley

[10:09] “The connector is what creates genuine wealth, an authentic wealth.”

[10:09] “You’re designing an experience where they become agents, they become connectors instead of leaders.”

[12:55] Bernie asks about colonial thinking, and Peter traces it to the 1600s Enclosure

[14:40] The health data that should change everything: “If you live in a coworking context, you’re going to live two years longer.”

[16:14] The missionary quote that captures colonialism: “When I opened my eyes, I was holding the Bible, and they owned the land.”

[22:05] ACTionism discussion: “Anxiety means that I’m alive. And my aliveness is created by our capacity to create something.”

[34:42] The developer meeting where Peter changed everything by askin,g “What is the crossroads you’re at?”

[36:09] Common good protocols vs royal protocols: “They’re up front. They’re on a platform. They have microphones.”

[37:42] “You find it everywhere if you’re looking for it”—pocket neighbourhoods, churches, coworking spaces

[42:04] The liberation line: “Your coworking spaces are designed for liberation, not for productivity.”

The Market Economy’s Hidden Colonialism

Peter traces our current isolation back to a specific moment: Enclosure in the 1600s.

Common land where people could support themselves was fenced in because sheep were more profitable. We’ve never recovered.

What started as a physical enclosure became psychological. The market economy doesn’t just want your money—it wants your identity. It turns you into a consumer, an audience member, a demographic to be sold to. Gen X, Gen D, Gen R. We label each generation according to what we can extract from them.

Coworking, with that small “co” at the front, offers something different. An invitation to produce together rather than consume alone.

But only if the people running these spaces understand what they’re actually doing.

Why Connectors Create Wealth (And Consumers Destroy It)

Peter distinguishes between wealth (scale, upward mobility, accumulation) and genuine wealth (health, safety, connection, purpose).

The market economy measures well-being by what can be monetised. Gross domestic product loves isolation—every transaction it can insert between neighbours is a win.

Coworking spaces, at their best, create genuine wealth. They’re places where a local graphic designer meets a local bakery owner, bypassing extraction entirely.

Bernie gets this instinctively from his newsletter work. He’s been writing about the difference between the market economy and creative economy for years. Peter gives him the language to understand why it matters.

The alternative isn’t anti-economic. It’s a different economy.

The Geometry of Democracy

Peter believes that how you arrange furniture is a political act.

Sit in rows facing a stage? You’re recreating a monarchy. The person at the podium holds power. Everyone else waits to be entertained, instructed, or sold to.

Sit in circles facing each other? Power gets distributed. You’re accountable to the person whose knees you can touch. You can’t hide behind your phone.

He tells the story of a developer meeting. Eighty angry neighbours showed up ready to fight. Instead of letting them line up at microphones to yell at the suits, Peter broke them into small groups. He asked: “What is the crossroads you’re at in this neighbourhood? When did you first start caring about this place?”

By the end of the hour, they weren’t angry anymore. They felt connected. The developers said, “Thank you for coming. I got it.”

Same people. Same building. Different geometry. Different outcome.

Safety as Connection, Not Police

Peter is blunt about the American obsession with safety: it’s a product being marketed.

The narrative is simple: the world is dangerous, you are vulnerable, buy this alarm system, vote for this tough-on-crime politician.

He flips this entirely. A safe neighbourhood isn’t one with more police cars. It’s one where neighbours know each other’s names.

He organises gatherings where, instead of asking “How can the police protect us?”, he asks a terrifying question: “What is my contribution to the lack of safety in this neighbourhood?”

This forces people to confront their own withdrawal. Their judgment of the “other.” Their refusal to engage.

For coworking operators, this reframes everything. Your space isn’t safe because of the keycard system. It’s safe because people know each other’s first names.

From Anxiety to Action

Bernie brings up ACTionism—the documentary he’s been encouraging coworking spaces to screen. What caught Peter’s eye was the phrase “We went from anxiety to action.”

Peter unpacks this beautifully. Anxiety means you’re alive. It’s not a problem to be medicated away. It’s a signal that you care about something and don’t know what to do about it.

The market economy wants you to co...

Unreasonable Connection Going Live! London, February 2026.

🎟️ Tickets go on sale in January 2026.

The entire day is co-created by the coworking community builders on the co-creation waitlist.

You know that exhausted feeling when another LinkedIn post promises to reveal “the future of work”?

Dean Connell spent seven years building WeWork spaces across the globe.

He’s designed over two million square feet of workspace.

He’s seen the industry from the inside of the machine.

And he’s done predicting the future.

Dean is the founder of I-AM.D.C., a workplace strategy, FF&E, and interior design consultancy specialising in workspace design and sustainable furniture sourcing. But before all that, he was employee number seventy-something at WeWork, one of seven designers tasked with scaling a Brooklyn aesthetic across continents.

What makes Dean different from the conference circuit commentators is simple: he’s actually built the things he talks about.

Not frameworks borrowed from McKinsey reports. Not insights repurposed from other people’s data. The proof lives in the spaces he’s made, the furniture he’s designed, the mistakes he’s learned from.

In this conversation, Bernie and Dean trace coworking’s evolution through three distinct eras.

There’s Bernard de Coven’s original vision from 1999—coworking as a method of working, equals gathered around a shared project.

Then there’s the 2005 version most of us know—work as the abstract centre, operators competing on price, location, and aesthetics. Beautiful design became table stakes. Everyone got good at desks and fast WiFi.

But Dean’s proposal for what comes next is a fundamental recentring.

Coworking 3.0 isn’t about work at all. It’s about the “hook”—a specific experience that unifies the community.

Veterinarians. Musicians. Parents need childcare. Food obsessives. Wellness practitioners.

The centrepiece shifts from “we have desks” to “this is who we are and why we gather.”

If you’ve been watching younger generations crave in-person experiences whilst the definition of “work” dissolves into digital abstraction, this framework makes sudden sense.

Dean isn’t selling certainty. He’s walking the path and documenting the journey.

For operators tired of chasing trends and ready to create something with genuine gravitational pull, this conversation offers a different way forward.

Timeline Highlights

[00:01] Bernie’s intro: “Today I’m talking with the best coworking space designer in Lewisham ever.”

[01:14] Bernie on the Unreasonable Connetion event: “150 seats because that’s Dunbar’s magic number for community”

[01:55] Dean’s philosophy distilled: “I would like to be known for doing the work... just that I was able to show up each day.”

[03:27] The LinkedIn exhaustion: “Performing in order to engage people to sell your services, for me, is exhausting.”

[04:38] The content trap exposed: “A lot of the content... is created from frameworks or they’re created from data... They’re taking that information, repurposing it.”

[06:46] The proof principle: “I’ve done the work, I have the proof, and so therefore it gives me the confidence to continually talk.”

[11:55] The design maturity problem: “Beautiful design is table stakes... you end up a little bit with beautiful design slop.”

[14:41] The uncomfortable truth: “There is no framework for creating something new... you just have to walk the walk.”

[20:31] Coworking 1.0 explained: “His idea of coworking was people working together as equals... congregate around the table in a non-hierarchical way.”

[22:49] Coworking 2.0 reality: “Most operators today are competing on price, location, and the quality of space.”

[25:51] The 3.0 proposal: “The centrepiece needs to shift to this concept of what I call a hook.”

[26:38] Beyond desks and WiFi: “It’s something beyond we have desks and super fast WiFi... It’s a new centre of gravity.”

[28:34] Programming for purpose: “You can programme the space... to accommodate different hooks.”

[29:24] Where to find Dean: “I am Dean Connell. You can find that on Substack... It’s called Work in Progress.”

The Exhaustion Economy: Why Future-of-Work Content Is Broken

Dean names something every operator feels but rarely articulates: the content industrial complex around “the future of work” has become performative theatre.

He’s been meditating on this. Actually doing the work of thinking it through rather than spinning plates for algorithm engagement.

The pattern he identifies is damning.

Most future-of-work content creators build from borrowed materials—McKinsey frameworks, conference insights, and other people’s data repurposed into LinkedIn carousels.

They’re aggregating rather than originating. There’s nothing wrong with synthesis, but when the entire ecosystem runs on recycled thinking, exhaustion becomes inevitable.

Dean’s exit strategy is radical simplicity: stop predicting, start creating.

Rather than telling people what the future holds, show them what today’s actions can generate. The future materialises through the act of doing the work, not through speculation about what might come.

For independent operators drowning in thought leadership that never seems to apply to their actual Tuesday morning problems, this reframe is liberating.

You don’t need to know where coworking is heading. You need to know what you’re building today and why it matters to the humans who show up.

The Proof Problem: Consultants vs. Builders

Dean draws a sharp line between those who advise on workspace and those who’ve actually delivered it.

His own credibility comes from a specific vantage point: he worked in-house.

Not as an outside consultant dropping recommendations and disappearing, but as someone embedded in the business delivering the product to end users. Strategy, design, user experience—he held the whole stack. The feedback loops were immediate and unforgiving.

This 360-degree view changes everything you understand about work.

When you’re accountable for outcomes rather than presentations, theory becomes expensive. What survives is what actually functions.

The workspace design industry has matured to a point where landlords are waking up to their ecosystems—retail, residential, commercial, all woven together. They’re hiring traditional consulting firms to develop these products.

The result, Dean argues, is beautiful design slop. Polished surfaces with no product evolution underneath.

The inherent product isn’t really evolved, he says. It’s just prettier.

For operators making decisions about their spaces, this is a helpful filter. Is this advice coming from someone who had to live with the consequences of their recommendations? Or someone who delivered a deck and moved on?

Coworking 1.0: Bernard de Coven and the Original Vision

Dean traces coworking back to its etymological roots, and the history matters more than most operators realise.

Bernard de Coven, an American game designer, coined the phrase in 1999.

His vision had nothing to do with shared desks, hot-desking, or any of the real estate language that would later colonise the term.

De Coven imagined people working together as equals. A project or task at the centre. Ten people congregating around a table in a non-hierarchical way to solve a particular problem. Breaking down corporate structures. Everyone is equal in his eyes.

This is the crucial insight: coworking, in its original...

Unreasonable Connection Going Live! London, February 2026.

🎟️ Tickets go on sale in January 2026.

The entire day is co-created by the coworking community builders on the co-creation waitlist.

“There’s definitely the trust aspect... People would come because they’re like, ‘Well, Williamz says that someone’s going to be here.’”

In September, Williamz Omope told us about the radical principle behind his Job Clubs: no eligibility criteria. Just show up and get help.

That episode introduced the philosophy. This one shows what happens when you take it further.

Williamz has been running Community Connect events — a three-zone model that sequences people through a “look good, feel good” zone (haircuts, nails, styling, professional headshots), a health zone (blood pressure, diabetes screening, NHS talking therapists), and an employment zone (CV support, life coaching, business advice).

The sequence matters. You get groomed. You get photographed looking your best. And because you’re already there, already feeling human again, you let someone take your blood pressure.

The NHS practitioners who attended reported something they’d never experienced: engagement all day. Not one person. Not the usual empty room. They were, in their words, “literally overwhelmed.”

The mechanism is trust. Williamz has spent months building relationships through the Job Club. When he says “come to this event, these health workers are good people,” the community believes him. They show up. They engage with services they’d normally avoid.

For any coworking operator who wants their space to genuinely matter to the neighbourhood — not just serve the laptop class who already know what coworking is — this is the blueprint.

It starts with a job club. It builds trust. And then that trust becomes infrastructure you can deploy for outcomes far beyond employment.

London youth unemployment sits at 15.3%. In Newham, it’s 8.7%.

The Job Clubs are busier than ever. At Space4, they had to stop advertising after two weeks. Fifteen people showing up when they expected three.

This is what civic infrastructure actually looks like.

Timeline Highlights

[00:04] Bernie sets the stakes: “In London, youth unemployment is at 15.3%... In Newham, East London, it is 8.7%, which is way above the national average”

[01:51] Williamz on what he’s known for: “I am known for being a social entrepreneur... we specialise in employability support, access to health messages, digital inclusion”

[02:36] The disruptive philosophy: “We want to go against the grain. That’s how we want to be disruptive”

[04:58] The Community Connect innovation: “We added three zones... a look good, feel good zone, a health zone, and an employment and business zone”

[05:28] The golden sequence: “You’d get your haircut done, get your nails done, and then you go get your headshot done for LinkedIn... Everything’s free, everything’s accessible”

[06:25] The mental health breakthrough: “A talking therapist from the NHS... she spoke about the taboos and the cultural misunderstandings, and she really broke things down”

[08:57] The anti-performative principle: “Anything that we do is not performative... It’s giving real pathways and routeways to overcome such barriers”

[10:39] Why trust is the infrastructure: “There’s definitely the trust aspect... People would come because they’re like, ‘Well, Williamz says that someone’s going to be here’”

[11:53] The proof point: “We were busy all day. Normally... we see one person, if that, but we were literally overwhelmed”

[21:07] The demand they didn’t expect: “The first couple of weeks was so busy that we had to stop advertising... we were getting 15 people per session”

[25:01] The unlimited support promise: “This is a safe space for you to come back to. You don’t have a number of sessions... You can come here as much as you want”

[28:07] Redefining success: “Them coming to the Job Club, that’s a huge journey because they’ve made that conscious decision to come”

[32:05] Peer-to-peer magic: “When are you coming next week? 10 o’clock? Okay, I’m going to get there for 10:30. I’ll wait for you. I’ll keep a computer next to...”

Trust Is Infrastructure You Can Build

The September episode established the “no eligibility criteria” philosophy. This episode reveals what you can DO with the trust that philosophy creates.

NHS outreach workers know the problem intimately. They set up stalls at community events. They wait. One person shows up. Sometimes none. The communities who most need health services are the ones least likely to engage with them.

Williamz solved this by accident — or rather, by relationship.

When health practitioners attend Community Connect, they’re not cold-calling a suspicious community. They’re being introduced by someone the community already trusts. Williamz has spent months showing up every Friday, helping with CVs, teaching digital skills, treating people with dignity.

That trust transfers.

The NHS talking therapist who attended spoke about mental health taboos and cultural misunderstandings.

As a Black man with Nigerian heritage, Williamz understands the cultural tendency to avoid doctors, to “ride it out.” By hosting these conversations in a space where people already feel safe, resistance drops.

For coworking operators: this is the long game. You can’t manufacture trust overnight. But every consistent, dignity-first interaction builds it. And once you have it, you can deploy it for outcomes far beyond your original remit.

The Three Zones: A Model You Can Steal

Community Connect isn’t complicated. It’s just sequenced intelligently.

Zone One: Look Good, Feel Good. A barber. A nail technician. A stylist offering budget fashion advice. A photographer taking LinkedIn headshots. The haircut comes first — you get groomed, then photographed looking your best.

Zone Two: Health. Blood pressure checks. Diabetes screening. An NHS talking therapist. These services are placed AFTER the feel-good zone, when people’s guards are down.

Zone Three: Employment and Business. IP advisers. Life coaches. A CV specialist. Local businesses recruiting.

The genius is the sequencing. Nobody walks through the door thinking “I need my blood pressure checked.” They walk through thinking “free haircut.” By the time they reach the health zone, they’re already comfortable, already engaged, already trusting.

Bernie notices what’s happening underneath: people finding what they need rather than being told what to do. Agency instead of top-down life management.

The Space4 Story: Organic Growth Done Right

Williamz didn’t know what a coworking space was when he first walked into Space4 for something unrelated.

A conversation with Natasha, one of the founders, evolved into partnership. She explained Space4’s social value model — a cooperative workspace funded by Outlandish, designed to reinvest surplus into community.

Williamz arrived with a proposition: “Let’s just start a job club.”

There was apprehension. “Are people going to turn up?”

Within two weeks, they had to stop advertising. Word of mouth outran their capacity. Fifteen people per session when they’d expected two or three.

Bernie’s known Space4 for a decade. It’s had hard times, mostly circumstances beyond its control.

But it keeps putting itself together. Founders and Coders run programmes there. The community lunch happens every Wednesday. It’s woven into Finsbury Park in ...

“It became the first seed of building the Hub Newry... a lived example of building a business with minimal capacities in terms of time, energy, childcare, and that emotional bandwidth that comes with it.”

Unreasonable Connection Going Live! London, February 2026.

🎟️ Tickets go on sale in January 2026.

The entire day is co-created by the coworking community builders on the co-creation waitlist.

Picture this: 2009.

The world economy has just collapsed.

You’ve left the high-pressure banking towers of London for a portacabin in Newry, Northern Ireland.

A toddler screaming in the background.

Your house isn’t built.

Your business is barely breathing.

You’re completely isolated in a border town that’s still processing thirty years of conflict.

This is where Suzanne Murdock built The Hub Newry—not from a business plan, but from desperate necessity.

Thirteen years later, she’s running one of Northern Ireland’s most successful coworking networks.

More importantly, she’s become the person operators turn to when they’re drowning.

When they’re holding everyone else’s problems, whilst their own systems fall apart.

This conversation cuts through the productivity theatre that plagues small business advice.

Suzanne doesn’t care about your morning routine or your notion templates.

She cares about understanding your actual energy.

Your real constraints.

Designing structures that work with your life instead of against it.

Bernie shares his recent ADHD diagnosis—a revelation that explained why conventional productivity advice never stuck.

Suzanne responds with the coaching insight that changes everything: “The problem isn’t the problem.”

Your speaking anxiety isn’t about public speaking.

Your overwhelm isn’t about time management.

Your burnout isn’t about working too hard.

For community managers drowning in everyone else’s needs, this episode is a lifeline.

For operators trying to scale whilst maintaining their sanity, it’s a roadmap.

For anyone who’s ever felt like productivity systems were designed for someone else’s brain, it’s validation.

Timeline Highlights

[00:05] Bernie announces two critical 2026 dates: Unreasonable Connection in London (end of February) and European Coworking Day (May)

[01:57] Suzanne’s origin story: fleeing London banking burnout for Northern Ireland isolation

[03:26] The portacabin moment that sparked The Hub Newry: “minimal capacities in terms of time, energy, childcare”

[06:16] Two years of explaining coworking to a market that didn’t understand it yet: “We spent a good two years trying to navigate that and script it”

[07:39] Bernie on the underrated value of structure: “It’s an underrated resource of having this structure in your work day when you’re running your own thing”

[08:39] Why coworking matters for new entrepreneurs: “There are so many unknowns out there. When other people surround you... It’s so helpful and rich.”

[13:59] The productivity trap: “It’s just assumed as entrepreneurs or small business owners that you can work 24 hours a day... it doesn’t work like that in real life”

[16:45] Bernie’s ADHD revelation: “Saying, Read David Allen, get things done, and it will all work, has never... You can’t just pull something out of a hat.”

[17:38] Suzanne on understanding yourself first: “Until you understand those elements, I think it’s very hard to get those structural things right”

[20:30] The importance of champions: “It really keeps coming back to really knowing yourself and having champions around you.”

[22:40] The coaching revelation: “A lot of people don’t know what their problem is... Listening is a huge part of it.”

[27:28] Community manager burnout: “That pot can sometimes feel very empty... we need champions around us... It can be quite a lonely place.”

[29:53] Setting boundaries with members: “They need to understand that they have to reach out sometimes as well... it goes two ways”

The Accidental Operator

Suzanne never intended to run a coworking space.

She intended to survive.

After leaving the financial sector in London in 2009, she found herself in a portacabin on a construction site.

Trying to run a business whilst raising a toddler.

In a town where she knew nobody.

The isolation was crushing.

Not just emotionally—economically.

Without a support network, without casual conversations, without the energy that comes from being around other people working on their own things, productivity was impossible.

The Hub Newry started because Suzanne and Patrick needed an office that wasn’t a freezing portacabin.

They renovated the first floor of an old pub.

Made it too big for just them.

Started letting desks to other isolated freelancers.

They didn’t know the term “coworking.”

They were solving a cash flow problem and a loneliness problem simultaneously.

This accidental beginning shapes everything about how The Hub operates today.

It wasn’t built on venture capital or growth targets.

It was built on the lived experience of what happens when you try to make something meaningful whilst juggling real-life constraints that business advice pretends don’t exist.

The Problem Isn’t the Problem

The most powerful insight in this conversation comes when Bernie admits his struggle with productivity systems.

Suzanne responds with coaching wisdom: “A lot of people don’t know what their problem is.”

Your speaking anxiety isn’t about speaking skills.

It’s about finding a format that gives you energy rather than drains it.

Suzanne discovered this when she started her podcast—terrified of public speaking but energised by one-to-one conversation.

Your time management problems aren’t about time.

They’re about understanding when your energy is highest.

Designing your day around that reality instead of fighting it.

Your team communication issues aren’t about communication.

They’re about setting boundaries that protect your capacity to hold space for everyone else.

This is why conventional productivity advice fails.

It treats symptoms, not root causes.

It assumes everyone’s brain works the same way.

Bernie’s ADHD diagnosis explained why Getting Things Done never stuck—his brain doesn’t work that way.

Zone of Genius Meets Real Life

Suzanne references Gay Hendricks’ concept of “zone of genius”—the intersection of what energises you and what you’re uniquely good at.

But she grounds it in reality.

Your zone of genius doesn’t matter if you don’t understand your actual constraints.

If you’ve got childcare responsibilities, health challenges, or financial pressures, your ideal day needs to work with those realities.

Not despite them.

The breakthrough comes when you stop trying to fit your life into productivity systems designed for someone else.

Start designing systems that fit your actual life.

This means understanding your energy patterns.

Your limiting factors.

Your support network before you build your schedule.

It means asking different questions:

Not “How can I be more productive?”

But “What structure supports my energy instead of depleting it?”

Community Managers in the Lonely Middle

The conversation exposes ...

Unreasonable Connection Going Live! London, February 2026.

🎟️ Tickets go on sale in January 2026.

The entire day is co-created by the coworking community builders on the co-creation waitlist.

Tash Koster-Thomas was delivering a paid webinar on LGBTQ+ allyship when the anonymous racist comments started scrolling across the screen.

Two hundred people watched as she broke down live on camera, choosing vulnerability over politeness, truth over comfort.

This wasn’t just a difficult moment. It was a perfect distillation of what Trans Awareness Week actually means in 2025 Britain—and why every coworking space owner needs to understand what’s happening right now.

Bernie sits down with Tash, equity and inclusion consultant and co-founder of Breaking the Distance, to unpack the brutal reality of the Supreme Court ruling that just made trans people legally vulnerable in British workplaces and public spaces.

You’ll hear how the law now allows employers to ask about someone’s “gender status.”

How the state’s own equality watchdog has redefined trans people’s right to exist as merely a “preference.”

And crucially, what coworking operators can do to create a genuine sanctuary when the government won’t.

This isn’t academic theory. This is survival economics in real time.

If you’ve ever wondered how to signal safety without performativity, or how to support marginalised communities when the law actively works against them, this conversation will show you exactly where to start.

The personal cost of this work is real. The political stakes couldn’t be higher.

And the practical steps forward are more straightforward than you might think.

Timeline Highlights

[00:04] Bernie’s announcement: Co-creating the London Coworking Assembly for February 2026—”you will design the curriculum or the agenda together”

[02:11] Tash’s mission statement: “Being a good human, actually. That’s what I’d like to be known for.”

[03:21] Trans Awareness Week scope: “It is global, but probably more prominent in the UK”

[04:16] The Supreme Court ruling explained: “Sex refers to being assigned female at birth, and are biological women. And therefore, if you’re a trans woman, you are not a biological woman.”

[06:45] The legal contradiction: “Just because you’re protected in this instance here, it still means you can be highly discriminated against.”

[07:48] The impact on coworking spaces: “We want to be a trans inclusive space and we welcome all, but now we feel like this ruling is a contradiction of that.”

[09:02] The intersex reality: “1.7% of our global population are intersex and fit into neither one of those binary categories”

[10:24] Fear as the weapon: “What happens is it creates fear more than anything”

[11:53] Clear signals matter: “If I see a space that says we are inclusive and it includes all women, trans and non-binary folk. That to me signals safe space.”

[13:57] The exclusion principle: “A safe space can’t always be a space that everybody comes to, because then by default, it stops being a safe space.”

[17:06] The moment of truth: “I’m not going to hide my tears right now. I want you to see the impact of these words.”

[19:24] Bernie’s visceral reaction: “I couldn’t believe you held it together.”

[21:04] The spotlight problem: “Trans community is facing the most amount of hate that it’s been facing all year because now it’s a spotlight”

[23:30] Allyship as consistency: “Allyship isn’t a thing that you can do as a performative thing. It has to be a consistent effort that you put in day in, day out.”

[24:32] Practical bathroom policy: “Put something up that says, We recognise that ideally we would be using gender-neutral toilets... you have the freedom to use whatever bathroom feels right for you.”

The Supreme Court Ruling Nobody Talks About

In April 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act means biological sex only—not gender identity.

Most people missed this. Most coworking operators definitely missed this.

But Tash explains the brutal implications with surgical precision: trans people can now be legally questioned about their “gender status” at work and excluded from toilets matching their lived identity.

The state’s own equality watchdog calls this loss of dignity a mere “preference for things to be a certain way.”

This isn’t legal theory. It’s economic precarity by design. When you can’t safely use a workplace toilet, you can’t safely earn a living.

For coworking spaces, this creates an urgent choice: follow the government’s new permission to discriminate, or become a sanctuary that provides the rights the state just stripped away.

Why Safe Spaces Can’t Include Everyone

Tash cuts through the liberal fantasy that inclusion means “everyone welcome always.”

“A safe space can’t always be a space that everybody comes to, because then by default, it stops being a safe space for the core demographic that you’re trying to defend and support.”

She draws the parallel with racism: if you’re creating a space for the global majority people to process discrimination, you can’t also welcome people who deny racism exists. Their presence destroys the safety you’re trying to create.

The same logic applies to gender-critical voices in trans-inclusive spaces. Not because those voices are evil, but because safety requires boundaries.

For coworking operators worried about appearing exclusive, Tash offers clarity: know who you’re serving. If you try to serve everyone, you serve no one safely.

The Viral Comments That Exposed Everything

The story that stays with you: Tash delivering a virtual LGBTQ+ session to 200 people when anonymous participants started posting racist comments in the chat.

The organisers, thinking they were being helpful, put the comments on screen for everyone to see.

Tash broke down live on camera. But instead of hiding her tears, she looked directly into the lens: “So often people sit behind keyboards and write these comments, and they don’t see the impact of their words. And today I want you to see the impact.”

That moment of vulnerability became the most powerful teaching tool imaginable. The CEO immediately stepped in. The entire organisation had to confront what they’d been harbouring. Allies reached out privately.

But here’s what haunts her: this only mattered because it was public. How many trans people face this abuse daily without witnesses? Without support? Without organisational learning?

The Economics of Absorbing Hate

Tash reveals the hidden cost structure of diversity work: companies pay her to process their toxicity.

She gets a fee for the webinar. But the real price—the emotional devastation, the tears, the psychological impact—gets absorbed by her personally. The company externalises its cultural problems onto the consultant it hires to fix them.

This is the diversity industry’s dirty secret. The very people most equipped to diagnose the problem are also the most vulnerable to its damage.

For coworking operators, this raises uncomfortable questions about how you handle incidents. Do you expect marginalised members to educate aggressive members? Do you put the burden of explaining discrimination on those experiencing it?

Or do you do the work yourself?

Practical Allyship That Actually Matters

Tash’s advice cuts through performative gestures to focus on sustainable support:

Learn the legal context. If you don’t understand the Supreme Court ruling and its im...

“Do you know who your coworking space’s biggest competitor is? It’s the Home Office, working from home.” - Lucy McInally

Unreasonable Connection Going Live! London, February 2026.

🎟️ Tickets go on sale in January 2026.

The entire day is co-created by the coworking community builders on the co-creation waitlist.

Lucy McInally, founder of The Inclusive Coworker and coworking industry writer, drops a truth bomb that stops Bernie mid-conversation. After two years in a beloved coworking community that closed down, she’s been working from home ever since—despite being one of the industry’s most thoughtful voices on inclusive community building.

This isn’t a story about laziness or preference. It’s about the hidden friction that kills coworking adoption: the 50-minute commute that used to be 25 minutes, the Spanish conversation anxiety that paralyses Bernie from entering perfectly good spaces in Vigo, the seasonal darkness that makes walking across Blackheath feel unsafe for Lucy.

Bernie admits his own contradictions—knowing 15 coworking spaces in his new Spanish city but unable to pluck up the courage to walk into any of them.

Lucy shares the practical magic of Clockwise Edinburgh: free yoga in the morning after her trial day, whiskey tasting on Friday evenings, and invitations that converted her from a curious visitor to a committed member.

The conversation unearths something deeper than marketing tactics: the micro-barriers that prevent connection, the difference between discount-led positioning and value-based invitation, and why showing lifestyle trumps showing desks every time.

This is for anyone who’s wondered why perfectly good coworking spaces struggle to fill their rooms, and why the biggest threat to your community might not be competition—it’s comfort.

Timeline Highlights

[01:15] Lucy’s revelation: “The biggest rival with your coworking space isn’t another coworking space. It’s your home.”

[03:13] Lucy’s confession: “I was part of a coworking space for two years... it closed down... I haven’t joined another coworking community.”

[05:00] Bernie’s Spanish anxiety: “The realistic blocker is, I’m so apprehensive about speaking Spanish to anyone that I don’t know.”

[05:50] Lucy’s commute reality: “What was 25 25-minute commute initially for me, then turned into 50 minutes... I don’t have the capacity to commute in and back again.”

[08:46] Bernie’s Vigo challenge: “It’s more of a membership place than a drop-in place... It’s hard to buy a day pass.”

[09:38] Lucy on trial days: “A lot of spaces here offer that free trial day... it is a really good way to test out if a space is right or not”

[11:54] The Clockwise magic moment: “Tomorrow we’re doing a yoga class in the morning... and we’re doing a whiskey tasting on Friday evening”

[12:58] Lucy’s safety barrier: “To get there, the most direct way is to walk across the heath... I don’t feel like that’s the safest way to commute.”

[13:13] Bernie’s coffee ultimatum: “If I go to a place that looks amazing and they’ve got this mediocre coffee machine... I don’t want to go there.”

[14:38] Bernie’s pricing frustration: “Their main flyer was 50% off... devaluing their product... then in the small print it read ‘for your first month’ I was ripped off before I even took the offer.”

[15:30] Lucy on value positioning: “You don’t need to say 50% off, because if you give me all the benefits... then I’ll pay full price”

[16:44] Lifestyle over space: “They don’t just show, here’s the space... They show, this is where we go for drinks... some of the local restaurants”

The Hidden Geography of Working From Home

Lucy’s confession hits like cold water: the coworking advocate who can’t bring herself to join another space. This isn’t hypocrisy—it’s human truth. The space she loved closed, her commute doubled, and suddenly the sofa became the easier choice.

Bernie’s Spanish paralysis adds another layer. He knows coworking spaces, runs coworking events, literally wrote about coworking citizenship—but anxiety about speaking Spanish keeps him from walking into perfectly good spaces opposite his apartment. The expertise doesn’t translate to courage.

These aren’t edge cases. They’re the hidden geography of remote work: the 20 micro-decisions that tip someone towards isolation over community. The slightly-too-long journey. The slightly-too-awkward interaction. The slightly-too-much effort.

Working from home isn’t just about convenience—it’s about avoiding the emotional labour of belonging somewhere new.

Why Location Anxiety Is a Real Community Killer

Lucy’s Blackheath revelation is faced by women everywhere: the most direct route to a promising coworking space requires walking across heathland in seasonal darkness. For women especially, safety calculations happen automatically, unconsciously filtering out options that men might never consider.

This geography of anxiety shapes community access in ways that marketing rarely addresses. It’s not about the space itself—it’s about the journey to get there, the time of day, the lighting, the route home.

Bernie’s Vigo situation adds another dimension: language anxiety creating invisible barriers. The professional confidence that works in London evaporates when faced with Spanish conversations. Suddenly, every interaction feels like an exam.

The spaces that win understand that accessibility isn’t just about ramps and doorways—it’s about emotional safety, practical safety, and the hundred tiny comfort calculations that happen before someone leaves their house.

The Discount Trap That Devalues Everything

Bernie’s visceral reaction to “50% off your first month” captures something essential about positioning. The space he loves—genuinely loves—cheapened itself with Black Friday language that made him feel manipulated before he’d even walked through the door.

Lucy’s counter-insight is brilliant: if you communicate the real value of community, connection, and belonging, people will pay full price. The discount suggests you don’t believe in your own worth.

This isn’t about being expensive for expensive’s sake. It’s about leading with what matters: the yoga class that happens the morning after your trial day, the whiskey tasting on Friday evening, the invitation to become part of something larger than workspace rental.

The spaces that thrive understand they’re not selling desk time—they’re selling the antidote to isolation. That has value. Price it accordingly.

When Cool Becomes Exclusion

Bernie’s story about feeling excluded by “two incredibly good-looking guys with MacBook Pros drinking cappuccinos” reveals how aspiration can become alienation. Those photos weren’t meant to exclude—they were meant to attract. But they sent a clear message about who belonged.

Lucy pushes back with nuance: there’s a difference between having a clear niche (tech bros for tech bros) and accidentally signalling exclusion through lazy representation.

The all-male panel phenomenon isn’t usually intentional—it’s what happens when you book from your immediate network without thinking about whose voices are missing.

The most successful coworking marketing shows real people in real moments, not aspirational lifestyle shots that feel like permission structures. Projects in Brighton nail this: they don’t just show the space, but also highlight where members go for drinks, local restaurants, and the lifestyle that comes with joining this community.

It’s lifestyle marketing done right: ...

“We are in a time of a meta-crisis... when everything around us is falling apart, what’s going to remain is each other. I believe that in those times, community is immunity.” - Xavier Damman.

Unreasonable Connection Going Live! London, February 2026.

🎟️ Tickets go on sale in January 2026.

The entire day is co-created by the coworking community builders on the co-creation/waitlist.

Xavier Damman spent a decade in Silicon Valley building companies, making exits, and playing the venture capital game to perfection.

But when he returned to Brussels six years ago, he brought something unexpected back with him: the conviction that the economic system that made him rich was leading us all to extinction.

In this episode, Bernie sits down with the co-founder of Storify and Open Collective—and now the founder of Commons Hub Brussels—to explore how a former tech entrepreneur is experimenting with dual currencies, peer-led governance, and radical transparency to rebuild community economics from the ground up.

You’ll hear how COVID killed traditional five-day-a-week coworking and why themed community days are filling the gap.

How Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning research on commons management became the blueprint for a new kind of space.

And why Xavier believes the future of coworking isn’t about design and amenities—it’s about becoming laboratories for economic systems that value care as much as performance.

This conversation cuts through the startup rhetoric to examine what it actually takes to build alternative economic infrastructure.

Not because it’s trendy. Because survival might depend on it.

If you’ve ever wondered whether there’s a way out of the extractive economy without abandoning community and connection entirely, this episode charts one possible path forward.

Timeline Highlights

[02:26] Xavier’s origin story: from Belgian engineer to Silicon Valley success to Brussels commons builder

[04:56] The meta-crisis awakening: when everything around us is falling apart, community becomes immunity

[06:26] Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize research and why commons management beats privatisation

[09:02] “Coworking is dead”: how COVID broke the five-day office model and what’s replacing it

[10:30] Crypto Wednesdays, AI Mondays, and the rise of themed coworking days

[11:45] Why magic happens at the intersection of different communities

[13:50] Trust-building through doing: the priceless value of shared projects

[16:18] Coworking as the new churches: rebuilding social fabric in a GDP-obsessed world

[17:07] How we destroyed relationships to turn them into transactions

[21:36] The Commons Hub token: introducing a dual-currency system that values care alongside cash

[22:59] How some members pay more euros, others contribute more time—and why both matter

[24:39] Why the current economic system is clearly leading us to extinction

[28:53] Money is just a proxy: reducing dependency through community exchange

Thematic Breakdown

The Silicon Valley Return: When Success Becomes a Crisis

Xavier’s journey from Belgian engineer to Silicon Valley exit and back to Brussels as a commons builder reveals a profound truth about our economic moment. Success within the system—the acquisition, the financial freedom, the validation—became the resource that allowed him to step outside and ask harder questions.

His story isn’t anti-technology or anti-entrepreneurship. It’s about using the tools of capitalism to fund experiments in post-capitalism. The irony is deliberate: he needed to win the game to reveal how broken the game actually is.

Community as Immunity in the Meta-Crisis

When Xavier talks about the “meta-crisis” and “polycrisis,” he’s not being dramatic. Climate collapse, institutional failure, social fragmentation—these aren’t separate problems but symptoms of the exact systemic breakdown.

His phrase “community is immunity” captures something essential about survival in unstable times. When the formal systems fail, what remains is the quality of relationships we’ve built with the people around us. This isn’t romantic community-building. It’s a practical resilience strategy.

The Death and Resurrection of Coworking

The five-day-a-week coworking model died with COVID, but something more interesting is emerging in its place.

Xavier’s themed days—Crypto Wednesdays, AI Mondays, Regen Sundays—represent a fundamental shift from spaces trying to be everything to everyone to spaces that curate specific communities around shared interests.

This isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about creating the conditions for what Xavier calls “serendipity”—the unexpected connections that happen when the right people show up at the right time.

The Economics of Care vs. The Monoculture of Performance

The Commons Hub’s dual-currency system—euros plus community tokens earned through care work—strikes at the heart of everything wrong with our economic system.

We live in what Xavier calls a “monoculture of a single currency” that only values performance and GDP contribution.

Love, care, beauty, maintenance—the work that actually makes community possible—gets no recognition. The dual currency doesn’t solve capitalism, but it creates a small space where different values can breathe.

Coworking as Economic Laboratory

Xavier views coworking spaces as the ideal testing ground for new economic models, as they’re small enough to experiment with yet substantial enough to matter.

When he says “coworking spaces could be this amazing laboratory where those experiments can be run,” he’s talking about something more radical than better coffee or faster WiFi.

He’s referring to spaces where people can explore various ways of relating to money, work, and one another. Where the logic of extraction gets suspended, even temporarily.

From Monoculture to Permaculture

The shift from “monoculture to permaculture” isn’t just an agricultural metaphor—it’s an economic strategy. Just as monoculture farming depletes soil, economic monoculture depletes communities.

Permaculture farming recognises that ecosystems need diversity to thrive; human communities need multiple currencies and ways of contributing.

Xavier’s vision isn’t about rejecting money entirely but reducing dependency on it by creating more ways for people to participate meaningfully in community life.

The Physical Commons in Digital Times

Despite his tech background, Xavier insists on physical space as essential infrastructure for community building. Churches provided this network of neighbourhood gathering places; coworking spaces can fill that role in secular, pluralistic ways.

But only if they embrace their civic responsibility rather than just chasing commercial real estate returns. The Commons Hub, located across from Brussels Central Station, isn’t coincidental—it’s positioned as infrastructure for the kinds of connections that make democracy possible.

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“It all started at 5 AM. We had explosions. My husband works for the Red Cross — they evacuate people. We’re always awake, tracking the news and knowing what's happened. I don’t know if somebody was injured tonight, but I’ll find out this evening when he comes home.”

This is how Helga Moreno’s morning began. Not with a standing desk and a flat white. With explosions.

With her husband running towards danger, she walks the dog and opens her laptop to write about member retention strategies for coworking spaces.

Helga is a senior marketer at Spacebring, an English Literature graduate and the author of fairy tales about coworking — including one about cyberspace that feels like it was written in a different lifetime.

She lives in Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine, near Odessa and the Black Sea. The sunny south, as she calls it.

Additionally, a frontline region where drinking water hasn’t run from taps in years, electricity cuts out for hours at a time, and heating remains uncertain as winter approaches.

In February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Helga and her family made a choice that would define everything that followed: stay together, no matter what. Her husband and son couldn’t leave Ukraine. So she didn’t either.

They’ve lived through displacement to Lviv, the return to Mykolaiv, the daily air raid alerts, the 11 PM blackouts, and the permanent uncertainty that rewires how you think about the future.

But here’s the contradiction that makes this conversation so vital: Helga’s job is to write polished content about optimising coworking spaces — automated invoices, maximised revenue per square foot, reducing churn.

Meanwhile, the coworking spaces in her country proved their value by doing the exact opposite. In February 2022, Ukrainian coworking spaces didn’t optimise.

They opened their doors for free. They became bomb shelters, refugee centres, humanitarian aid hubs. They abandoned the profit motive entirely because survival demanded it.

Helga holds both of those truths at once. She co-founded the Ukrainian Coworking Association, which partnered with CBRE to document the state of the industry under war conditions.

She travels to conferences — two-day bus journeys, flights via Moldova — to experience “normal life,” where the lights stay on after 11 pm. And she comes home to a city where choosing a coworking space means asking: Does it have a generator? Does it have a bomb shelter?

This conversation isn’t about marketing tactics or SaaS metrics. It’s about what coworking actually means when everything transactional falls away. It’s about a storyteller who wrote children’s fantasies about cyberspace, now writing testimony about digital resistance and economic survival.

And it’s about a community that proved — when one of their own needed £1,500 per night for private hospital care to save her son’s life — that community isn’t networking. It’s tangible, life-saving support.

Helga is speaking at two major events: an online conversation with Jeannine van der Linden and Marko Orel on 27th November about displaced Ukrainians and reconstruction, and Coworking Europe in Berlin.

Her conference bio ends with an invitation: “While her focus is on marketing, Helga lives in the south of Ukraine; if you want to know how things are right now, she invites you to come and ask.”

Bernie took her up on it.

Timeline Highlights

* [01:36] “It’s Mykolaiv, near Odessa, near the Black Sea” — Helga introduces herself from the sunny south of Ukraine, a frontline region

* [04:45] “It all started at 5 AM. We had explosions. My husband works for the Red Cross — they evacuate people.”

* [06:24] “We still don’t have drinking water in my city. We have electricity schedules — 2 hours on, 3 hours off”

* [08:02] “We decided we must stay together. My husband and my son couldn’t leave Ukraine. So if I go, I leave my men here in the warzone.”

* [09:13] “I keep my laptop charged all the time. If I’m out of charge or internet, I go to a café. We have one coworking space that still works.”

* [10:38] “Power generator and bomb shelter” — the criteria for choosing a coworking space in Ukraine

* [11:57] “To go to Berlin, I go to Moldova and take a plane. Otherwise, it’s a bus for two nights and two days.”

* [15:56] “We don’t deal with uncertainty. We have to accept it. We can’t plan for years. We’re not buying an apartment because it can be ruined anytime.”

* [18:55] “Every night we have air raid alerts. People in Kyiv sleep in the subway with their kids. It’s really cold already.”

* [20:31] “My part is to analyse the coworking industry during wartime — from completely zero when everything stopped, to thriving spaces now”

* [21:57] “My son was drafted. He lived in a tent in the snow without heating. He got really sick — 40-degree fever for three weeks.”

* [23:55] “The hospital was €1,400–€500 per night. The coworking community did fundraising. We could afford it. My son fully recovered.”

* [27:25] Bernie’s reflection: “How do you juggle going to a conference, blogging about member retention, and rescuing your son like that?”

When the Profit Motive Vanished Overnight

In February 2022, Ukrainian coworking spaces had a choice: optimise revenue or save lives.

They chose lives. Instantly. Without committee meetings or PR consultants.

The Future Hub in Lviv sheltered families fleeing from Kharkiv and Kyiv. Startup Depot hosted over 150 refugees, primarily women and children. B-Working in Kyiv turned its concrete basement into a public bomb shelter during missile attacks.

Helga mentions one coworking space in Mykolaiv that’s still open — chosen not for its coffee quality or meeting room availability, but for its generator and bomb shelter.

This is the contradiction Helga lives inside. Her day job is writing about automated invoices, maximised square footage, and reducing churn.

But the coworking spaces in her country proved their value by doing the exact opposite. They gave everything away for free. They ceased to be businesses and became civic infrastructure.

“We decided we must stay together,” Helga says, describing the family decision in February 2022. Her husband and son couldn’t leave Ukraine. So she didn’t either. It’s a microcosm of what happened across the sector.

The transactional gave way to the existential. Revenue per square foot became irrelevant. What mattered was shelter, warmth, electricity, and community.

Helga worked with the Ukrainian Coworking Association. Their first significant act wasn’t policy work or internal strategy. It was documentation. They partnered with CBRE to gather data on the state of the market under war conditions. It was an act of testimony. Proof of existence. We are still here. This is real.

The global coworking industry debates tactics for reducing churn and optimising meeting room pricing.

Ukraine demonstrated the fundamental value proposition of shared space: the capacity to transform into life-saving infrastructure in a single day.

The Philologist Who Wrote About Cyberspace

Before the war, Helga wrote a children’s fantasy book called Journey into the Net. It was about the hopeful possibilities of cyberspace, the magic of digital connection, and the adventure of navigating the online world.

Now she writes testimony. Documentation. Strategies for survival. Her company, Spacebring, isn’t just selling software anymore — ...

Stephen Phillips spent most of his adult life in London’s casual dining world. Now he’s co-founded Neighbours & Nomads—a coworking space, bar, and community hub in El Nido, Palawan, Philippines.

The transition wasn’t gentle. Double the budget. Twice the time. Learning to navigate Philippine construction, permits, and bureaucracy from scratch. Opening in the downseason with a fragile local power grid and the constant threat of infrastructure failure.

But here’s what makes this conversation worth your time: Stephen brought something from those London restaurant years that most coworking operators never develop. The ability to create genuine hospitality at scale.

The instinct for when to apply commercial savvy and when to just be human. The understanding that you have far more time to build rapport in a coworking space than you ever had serving tables—and what to do with that gift.

This isn’t a “follow your dreams” story. It’s a clear-eyed account of what it actually takes to build community infrastructure in a place where digital nomads worry the Wi-Fi will fail mid-call and the power will cut out during their deadline.

Stephen solved the infrastructure problem—dual fibre connections, backup systems, air conditioning that works—but that’s just the entry ticket.

The real story is in the human systems. How do you obtain genuine Google reviews without resorting to bribery? How do you recover from service failures when you’ve got weeks, not minutes, to make it right?

How do you balance the economics of serving both Manila professionals working remotely and nomads earning global salaries? And why does the word “nomad” mean something completely different in the Philippines than it does in Bali or Lisbon?

If you’re running a coworking space in a destination location, or thinking about it, this episode will save you months of expensive mistakes. If you’ve ever worked in hospitality and wondered how those skills transfer, Stephen’s already done the translation work for you.

Timeline Highlights

[01:48] “Creating local spaces that open doors to locals and remote workers and create opportunity for growth and community”

[03:33] “Double the budget and twice the amount of time... If we could have done, I think having more time to build the community”

[05:22] “I now know how to build, construct a building in the Philippines... what permits I have to get and how to get them and how to avoid fines”

[07:27] “The hook for me was confidence... their assumption is the infrastructure... will be terrible. You've got to give them the confidence that you’ve worked that out.”

[09:34] “You can’t get volume out of locals when it comes to reviews... Often, just asking... is half the battle”

[12:25] “We have people literally knocking on the door... ‘Do you want to buy 100 Google reviews?’ We made the call very early doors, which was not in line with our values.”

[14:01] “Commercial savvy with genuine hospitality. I think the two have got to really work hand in hand.”

[16:53] “It’s more of the upside and far, far less of the downside... You have the time to build rapport and relationships.”

[19:38] “We saw that they’d used a half-day pass and we just recredited it... sent them a note... It’s easy to look for those opportunities to wow people.”

[22:24] “We call them remote workers because in the Philippines, nomads still probably got that slightly 19th-century connotation to it”

[25:45] “A nomad has got that connotation of a hobo... the drifter... The word has just not been modernised like it has in the West.”

[26:52] “We need a bit more critical mass... Pure volume is going to bring our ideas to life.”

[28:16] “We’re going to put all the infrastructure in and all the training in... now it’s got to be stress-tested”

The Infrastructure Confidence Game

Digital nomads researching the Philippines face a harsh reality: the infrastructure may not be reliable. Power cuts. Unreliable Wi-Fi. Backup systems that aren’t actually backed up.

Stephen’s first job wasn’t building community—it was solving the infrastructure problem so thoroughly that remote workers would believe him when he said it worked.

Dual fibre-optic connections. Reliable power. Air conditioning that actually runs all day. These aren’t luxury amenities in El Nido; they’re proof that you’ve done the homework.

But here’s where it gets interesting: you can’t just solve the problem. You have to prove you’ve solved it. That’s where the Google reviews become critical. A digital nomad choosing between Bali, Thailand, or the Philippines will do desktop research.

They’re looking for social proof that someone like them successfully worked from your space without their client call dropping or their deadline getting torched by a power outage.

The infrastructure is the entry ticket. The reviews are the invitation. Neither works without the other. Stephen learned this faster than most because he came from the hospitality industry, where the gap between what you promise and what you deliver can destroy businesses overnight.

The Art of the Genuine Ask

Stephen’s team doesn’t buy Google reviews. People knock on the door weekly, offering to sell them 100 five-star ratings. They say no every time.

Instead, they’ve built a system that feels human: they wait until someone’s last day, when the experience is fresh and complete. They ask directly—would you mind leaving us a review? If the person says yes and genuinely had a good time, they offer a coffee as a thank you.

The coffee costs less than 20 pence. That’s not the point. The point is timing and intent. These remote workers have spent weeks in the space.

They’ve built relationships with the team. They’ve seen the kitchen, met the chef, and experienced the care. By the time someone asks for a review, it’s not a cold transaction—it’s a natural extension of the rapport that’s already there.

This only works because the underlying experience is genuine. You can’t manufacture five-star reviews with a 20p coffee if the Wi-Fi failed three times and lunch was consistently late.

The “commercial savvy” Stephen talks about isn’t manipulation—it’s recognising the moment when someone genuinely wants to help you and making it easy for them to do so.

The contrast with fake reviews isn’t just ethical. It’s strategic. Fake reviews create expectations you can’t meet. Genuine reviews, even if they take longer to accumulate, bring you the right customers—people who actually want what you’re offering.

Hospitality Time Versus Restaurant Time

In a restaurant, you have 90 minutes to make an impression. Maybe two hours if it’s a special occasion. Everything moves fast. If something goes wrong, you’ve got minutes to recover before the experience is ruined and the customer leaves forever.

Coworking spaces operate on a completely different timescale. Someone buying a monthly pass will be in your space for weeks. You build rapport gradually.

You learn their name, their work patterns, and their coffee order. When something goes wrong—and it will—you have time to notice, time to fix it, and time to go beyond fixing it.

Stephen tells the story of a lunch order that got lost in the kitchen for 25 minutes. In a restaurant, that’s a disaster requiring immediate comped drinks and a grovelling apology. In the coworking space, the customer didn’t even care. They’d met the chef. They knew the standard. They’d built enough relationship capital that one mistake registered as human error, not system failure.

But Stephen’s team didn’t stop there....

When it’s easier to dial into the Zoom call than get in the car. When streaming feels more sensible than showing up.

When convenience wins and connection loses.

Shamena Nurse-Kingsley runs Cowo & Crèche in Alexandria, Virginia—a faith-forward, family-focused coworking space that hosts Celebration Church DC every Sunday morning.

She’s a US Air Force veteran and former federal employee who’s built what she unapologetically calls a “Kingdom business.”

In a city of 159,102 people, she’s got 50 coworking seats and capacity for 338 at events.

Her response when Bernie asks about the numbers: “I like my odds.”

This conversation cuts to the heart of what independent operators are avoiding: that convenience is killing community. Trying to appeal to everyone makes you invisible. Those values-driven spaces cut through the noise better than generic flexibility ever will.

Bernie brings his own experience growing up in church communities—the barbecues after Mass, the football teams, the youth clubs—where connection happened not because it was convenient, but because people showed up.

Shamena talks about partnership agreements that blend grace with structure, about hosting Muslim groups for Iftar celebrations, about baptism pools and production equipment. About why “people are good” and why showing up in person still matters even when the screen would be easier.

This is for operators who’ve watched members drift towards the convenience of home. Who wonders if community still matters. Who needs permission to lean harder into their values rather than softer?

Timeline Highlights

[01:35] Shamena “I am being known for my very unapologetic, faith-forward space”

[02:56] Alexandria has 159,102 people—Shamena likes her odds with 50 coworking seats

[04:51] “It’s Club Jesus. Every single Sunday, it’s absolutely Club Jesus here!”

[06:09] How partnership agreements work: assets, lighting, production, grace, and structure

[11:30] Shamena’s story: flying to Paris to see Messi play, then he moves to Miami

[13:34] “There’s this sense of relief. You can hear the music, you can get a hug.”

[15:16] The elephant in the room: “Connection is more important than convenience”

[17:04] “Winter is coming. It is cold here. It’s going to be like 50 degrees.”

[19:28] The critical question: is the faith organisation a partner or a client?

[21:23] The baptism pool situation—where grace meets logistics

[22:45] A Muslim group calls to host Iftar: “Yes, sure. Come on in.”

[24:02] “People are good. I’m still a believer, Bernie, that people are good”

[26:03] “Bernie is palm tree shady”—the banter that proves real friendship

The Elephant Everyone’s Avoiding

No one wants to say it out loud: convenience is killing community.

Shamena names it without hesitation. “I think no one wants to step on people’s toes, right? No one wants to say, speak out against remote work because everyone’s like, it’s so convenient.”

Remote work is convenient. Streaming church is convenient. Staying in bed on a Sunday morning, in your pyjamas, with your Bible and the television, is convenient.

But convenient isn’t the same as connected.

“We’ve just put so much emphasis now on our convenience and self, and my own convenience and my own comfort. And now, connection is going down, down, down that list.”

This isn’t anti-remote-work. Shamena built Cowo & Crèche partly because remote work created impossible situations for working parents—she didn’t want YouTube raising her children whilst she worked. The problem isn’t flexibility. It’s when convenience becomes the only metric that matters.

Bernie recognises this tension immediately: “We talk about connection and community more than ever, and maybe that’s just because we’re in the coworking industry.”

But talking about connection and actually creating the conditions for it are entirely different things.

The operators who thrive won’t be the ones offering the most convenient option. They’ll be the ones creating experiences worth the inconvenience of showing up.

Partnership vs Client: Structure Behind the Grace

Here’s what most operators miss when working with faith organisations: the distinction between partnership and client relationships matters.

“Is this a partnership with the faith-based organisation, or are they a client? That’s a good starting point.”

For Cowo & Crèche, Celebration Church DC (pastored by Anthony Vaughn and Brenda Vaughn) isn’t just renting space on Sundays.

They’re in a genuine partnership—sharing assets, production equipment, and lighting. The church has invested in permanent infrastructure that benefits the space all week.

But partnership doesn’t mean woolly boundaries.

“We do have our SOPs. We do have partnership agreements. You should lock those things in and let it be tight. But also knowing that, listen, we’re going to have a baptism here coming up on Sunday. There’s a whole baptism pool situation.”

This is what Shamena calls “Kingdom business”—grace layered with structure and systems. She’s got 25 years of experience in budgeting and logistics and two master’s degrees. “By no means am I just here riding on a Jesus high with no structure, right?”

The emails about mop situations and towel logistics for baptism pools. The evening setup time is not charged at market rate because it’s a partnership, not a transaction. The clear understanding that business remains business even when relationships run deeper.

Grace and structure. Both are held in tension.

The 160,000-Person Opportunity

Bernie asks the question every operator should ask: “How many people live in Alexandria?”

Shamena Googles it mid-conversation: “In the city of Alexandria, as of 2024, there are 159,102 people. In my space, I have 11,597 square feet, and the fire marshal tells me that I can have 338 people in here.”

Her response: “I like my odds.”

This is the mathematics of the niche. In a city of 160,000 people, you don’t need to appeal to everyone. You need to become the obvious choice for your people.

Bernie makes the point sharper: “There’s actually more coworking seats in London than there are people... There’s always more people than there are seats, and people are always trying to be the same.”

Everyone’s competing to be vanilla. To be neutral. To offend nobody and appeal to everybody.

Shamena’s doing the opposite. Faith-forward. Family-focused. Veteran-owned. Unapologetic.

The question isn’t whether your values will turn some people away. They will. The question is whether they’ll make you magnetic to the right people.

When the Building Becomes a Congregation

Every Sunday morning, Cowo & Crèche transforms.

“It’s Club Jesus. Every single Sunday, it’s absolutely Club Jesus here.”

Shamena and her husband don’t pastor the church—they host it. They’re part of the congregation. They’ve woven their business and their faith community together in ways that blur the boundaries in generative ways.

Bernie names what this really is: “It’s like hosting a party every weekend, guaranteed in your coworking space.”

People come through the doors after a hard week and feel relief.

* They hear music.

* They get hugs.

* They feel at home.

* They’re part of something that doesn’t kick them out on a time clock.

Bernie recognises this from his own upbringing: “My mum was a teacher and sh...

“I really struggled to relate to people at school because the conversations that I was hoping to be able to have with my friends were about the things that were going on outside the school gates... But what I love about finding the collective is that it’s given me permission to imagine another way of doing things, and that it really has felt like a real homecoming.”

Ellie Meredith is 19 years old. She’s a Community Cultivator at Re-Action Collective, co-organiser of Shrewsbury’s Climate Café, and the protagonist of a 25-minute documentary called ACTionism that’s currently screening in living rooms, pubs, libraries, and coworking spaces across the world.

But two years ago, she was crawling inside herself, overwhelmed by climate anxiety, trapped in a classroom where nobody wanted to talk about the things that actually mattered.

The shift came from two questions. Not from a therapist. Not from a careers advisor. From Jon Alexander, whom she’d emailed after reading his book about citizenship.

He asked, "What gives you joy?" And where does that joy meet the work that needs doing in the world?

Those questions cracked something open. Within weeks, she’d met the crew at Re-Action Collective—a grassroots organisation challenging the outdoor industry’s throwaway culture by teaching repair, running gear rental schemes, and making the outdoors accessible to people who’ve been priced out. She’d found her people. She’d stopped trying to save the planet alone.

This conversation isn’t just about Ellie’s journey. It’s about what coworking spaces can do with a 25-minute film, a room full of chairs arranged in a circle, and an invitation to dream together about what could happen next in your community.

Bernie and Ellie walk through the mechanics of hosting a community screening—how to avoid the tumbleweed moment after the credits roll, why repair workshops and art supplies work better than Q&As, and what actually happens when you give people permission to imagine differently.

If you’ve ever wondered how to use your space for something deeper than hot-desking, this is the blueprint. Find your people. Host a screening. See what begins.

Timeline Highlights

[01:14] Bernie sets the frame: this is about getting like-minded people in your coworking space, watching something together, and having intentional conversations afterwards

[02:21] Ellie’s realisation: “Do you know how much of a life fluke that is?” — finding your people quickly after leaving school

[02:35] “I was feeling quite lost at sea and fairly lonely. I really struggled to relate to people at school because the conversations I was hoping to have were about things going on outside the school gates.”

[04:21] The origin of Ellie’s climate concern: volunteering with Shropshire Wildlife Trust, watching flooding happen more and more, seeing nature collapse on her doorstep

[07:51] Bernie’s question about neurodiversity: Does feeling things more deeply make the horror worse when you see a flood?

[09:09] “Being neurodivergent certainly adds another level of complexity to the read that I have on the world.”

[10:19] How ACTionism works: community screenings in living rooms, pubs, libraries, anywhere people gather—not on streaming platforms, not touring cinemas

[12:37] Bernie asks the hard question: how do you avoid the awkward silence after showing a film?

[14:25] The circle method: sit everyone in a big circle, including the filmmaker, so it’s not one person answering questions but the whole room having a conversation

[16:04] What happens after screenings: dreaming activities with post-it notes, repair workshops, art supplies for visual responses

[19:09] Bernie: “How on Earth did you find yourself in a film?”

[21:12] The email that changed everything: Ellie writes to Jon Alexander after reading his book about citizenship

[24:46] Bernie’s main takeaway from the Conduit event: we don’t have to have all the answers

[29:00] Where to find Ellie: LinkedIn, and obviously the Re-Action Collective

The Neurospicy Activist Who Hated Four Walls

School was suffocating for Ellie. Not in the vague, everyone-hates-homework way.

In the specific, visceral, ‘I’m-crawling-inside-myself’ way that happens when you’re neurodivergent and the world insists you sit still in four walls whilst climate collapse is happening outside the gates.

She describes herself as a “neurospicy human”—a phrase that does more work than any clinical diagnosis could. It signals: I feel things on a different frequency.

The mounting pressure of exams didn’t just stress her out; it became too much. The conversations at school weren’t about what mattered. They were surface-level whilst floods were getting worse in Shropshire, whilst nature was collapsing on her doorstep from her volunteer work with the Wildlife Trust.

Bernie picks up on this immediately. He asks if neurodiversity exacerbates the feeling of horror when you see a flood.

Ellie’s answer: “I definitely feel things a lot more deeply than other people. My senses around it are very much heightened, and I don’t really know where to put any of that energy unless it’s part of collective action.”

This is the heart of why ACTionism matters for coworking spaces. Your members aren’t all neurotypical. They’re not all processing climate anxiety, economic precarity, or community collapse in the same way.

But many of them are feeling it deeply, and they don’t know where to put that energy. The solo mission to save the world—buying a reusable cup, recycling properly—feels joyless because it is. It’s action without connection. It’s doing something to feel less helpless, not because it actually changes anything.

Ellie found the outlet she needed when she found Re-Action Collective. Not because they had the answers, but because they gave her a crew. People who cared about the same things. People who were doing something together, not alone.

Two Questions That Rerouted Everything

After leaving school, Ellie emailed Jon Alexander. She’d read his book about citizenship—stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things—and it cracked something open. She wasn’t expecting much back. Maybe a thumbs up. Maybe nothing.

Instead, Jon invited her to London. They sat down together, and he asked two questions:

* What gives you joy?

* Where does that joy meet the work that needs doing in the world?

Those questions are deceptively simple.

They’re not: What do you want to be when you grow up? Or what’s your five-year plan? They’re citizen questions, not consumer questions. They assume you have agency. They assume the world needs what brings you alive.

Ellie’s answer: she loved being outside, volunteering with the Wildlife Trust, and she wanted to do more with other people in her community.

Jon made the connection to Re-Action Collective, a grassroots organisation in the French Alps working on circular economy solutions for the outdoor industry.

Two years later, she’s a Community Cultivator there, and her journey is the spine of a documentary being screened in hundreds of communities worldwide.

For coworking operators, this moment is instructive. The most valuable thing you can offer your members isn’t faster WiFi or better coffee.

It’s the connection between what gives them joy and the work that needs to be done. Sometimes that connection happens in a casual hallway conversation.

Sometimes it happens because you hosted a film screening and someone realised they weren’t alone.

Jon Alexander didn’t solve Ellie’s climate anxiety. He asked better questions. Your coworking space can do the same.

Community Screenings as Civic Infrastructure

ACTio...

“When there is such a place in a peripheral area, it’s usually a place that a young person will visit one way or another. You can reach out to them. You can walk around the neighbourhood because we’re talking about small communities, so you know each other.”

Dimitris is a PhD researcher at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens, Research Fellow at Politécnico di Milano for the Remaking Horizon project on remote working policies, project lead for Rural Radicals, collaborator on EU and EEA-funded initiatives like ResMove and Cowork4YOUTH.

He’s a storyteller who changed his medium from literature to community infrastructure. His entire professional life reads as a search for a new, more empowering narrative for the people and places left behind by Europe’s dominant economic story.

He grew up in Greece’s intellectual centres—Thessaloniki and Athens—but now turns his focus to the periphery. The forgotten villages. The declining market towns. The suburbs where the last young person left decades ago.

He’s translating the language of the urban core and applying it to heartlands that desperately need new economic models.

The problem is stark: across Spain, France, Greece, and beyond, entire regions are being drained of their young talent. Not a trickle, but a haemorrhage.

The brightest minds pack bags and board planes from regional airports, heading for Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona, and London.

The term “brain drain” sounds clinical. But behind every statistic is a family losing a daughter, a village losing its future, a local economy losing the one person who might have started something new.

Dimitris isn’t just researching this crisis. He’s building the infrastructure to reverse it. His work poses a provocative question: what if coworking spaces are more than just remote work and good Wi-Fi?

What if they’re actually civic infrastructure—the new town squares where young people practise economic citizenship, where migrants find pathways to entrepreneurship, where peripheral communities discover they don’t need to move to the capital to build meaningful work?

This conversation explores how collaborative spaces can become mediators, bringing together digital opportunities, community networks, and practical skills training.

Bernie and Dimitris discuss everything from the cost-of-living crisis pushing people back to smaller towns, to the specific challenges facing Greece’s social enterprise sector, to why youth retention requires more than sporadic events—it demands organised, sustained policy that connects bottom-up needs with top-down support.

This episode matters because it challenges the narrative that economic opportunity only exists in major cities. For independent coworking operators, this masterclass helps you understand your role not just as a business owner, but as a community anchor.

For anyone working in peripheral regions, it’s proof that brain gain is possible when you build the proper infrastructure for connection, learning, and economic agency.

⏱ Timeline Highlights

[01:24] Dimitris introduces himself: PhD researcher studying youth engagement and employment policies in collaborative workspaces across peripheral Europe

[04:04] Bernie asks the sleep question—when does Dimitris rest with so many projects spinning simultaneously?

[06:45] “Peripheral doesn’t just mean rural—it can be a left-behind suburb or an old warehouse area inside a city”

[09:05] “Building your network is one of the hardest things young people need to do. The opportunities to build your network are very, very small nowadays.”

[12:23] The economic reality: young people move from Vigo to Barcelona and Madrid, taking their wealth with them—coworking spaces can anchor people locally

[16:00] “The cost-of-living crisis discourages young people from staying longer in big cities”

[17:51] “Many old institutions, like community centres, adopt coworking practices and rebrand themselves as hubs”

[18:04] Bernie asks about Dimitris’s ideal hub—the mental picture he carries

[20:19] “It’s really nice, in Greek, we say to listen to a good word, to a nice word every day when you go.”

[22:00] Where to find Dimitris: LinkedIn is the central hub for all his projects and deliverables

[24:01] Bernie’s closing: host a screening of the Actionism film in your coworking space to kickstart community conversations about collective action

The Peripheral Economy Problem

The language matters here. Dimitris doesn’t say “rural decline” like it’s inevitable. He says “peripheral areas” because geography isn’t the only factor. You can be peripheral in the heart of a city—an old industrial quarter where the factories closed, where services dried up, where nobody opens new businesses anymore.

These areas share common symptoms: population loss, ageing demographics, limited job opportunities, poor digital infrastructure, and a persistent sense of being left behind. The social and economic isolation feeds on itself. When young people leave, they take energy, ideas, purchasing power, and hope with them.

This isn’t just about losing workers. It’s about losing the social fabric. When the young leave, community organisations lose volunteers. Local businesses lose customers. Schools close. The remaining residents age in place, and the cycle becomes self-reinforcing.

Dimitris has spent years interviewing young people across Europe who are beneficiaries of employment and engagement initiatives run through collaborative spaces. What he’s discovered challenges the fatalistic narrative that these places are doomed.

The pattern he’s documenting suggests that with the proper infrastructure—both digital and social—peripheral regions can offer something cities increasingly can’t: affordability, community, and quality of life.

The pandemic proved this wasn’t just a theory. During lockdowns, knowledge workers fled expensive city centres for countryside cottages and coastal towns.

Some stayed. The question now is whether communities can build the right conditions to make staying attractive, not just temporarily tolerable.

Youth Engagement as Community Infrastructure