Work House I: the Barings of Mincing Lane

This is part one of a three part series on the past, present, and future of the home as a workspace. Part two is here, and three, here.

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London, 1762. It was Christmas Day and Francis Baring’s seven-year apprenticeship had ended.

That same day, in his Cheapside home, he founded the merchant bank that bears his name.

Francis worked from home. At 6 Mincing Lane - the family’s base for 23 years - the banking happened downstairs, whilst upstairs, ten children were raised.

He wasn’t alone. Down the road William Strahan was busy publishing Hume’s History of England, from his ever-expanding home on Shoe Lane.

When Strahan had a quiet moment, he would have been able to catch up on his correspondence with Benjamin Franklin, who worked from his home at 36 Craven Street.

A likely topic of conversation would have been Samuel Johnson - one of Strahan’s authors - who just fifteen years prior compiled his famous A Dictionary of the English Language.

Johnson did so from his home in 17 Gough Square: working in one of the attic rooms, from an armchair missing one arm and one leg, alongside his wife Elizabeth, and their cat, Hodge.

In his spare time Johnson would have visited Elizabeth Montagu, whose home on Hill Street doubled as the premier London salon, or William Hunter, physician to the queen, whose home on Windmill Street included a lecture theatre, dissecting room, and museum.

Not even the Prime Minister at the time - the 3rd Earl of Bute - worked from the office. Despite 10 Downing Street being available, he instead preferred to work from his home in South Audley Street.

This way of living, and working, was not unique to Georgian London. Whether it was a Roman domus, a Japanese machiya, or a Dutch canal house, for most of human history, you lived where you worked, and worked where you lived.

In Britain in 1762, the home was the centre of the economic world. As economist George Alogoskoufis puts it:

“The emergence of capitalism in Britain and elsewhere from the 1600s to the mid-19th century did not take place primarily in factories, but in people’s houses. Workers made everything from dresses to shoes to matchboxes in their kitchens or bedrooms.”

But this nation of home-workers was soon to disappear.

A five minute walk from Mincing Lane sat East India House, renovated in 1729 to become one of a growing number of new buildings designed for work: offices.

For almost 300 years, this new invention was refined and improved. Elevators. Skyscrapers. Air conditioning. Cubicles. Open planning. Ergonomic furniture.

Offices became better and better places to work, outcompeting the home as it settled - comfortably - into being a place solely for living in.

But we’ve now returned to the home as a meaningful place of work.

Around 80% of US and European companies now practise hybrid working (rising to 93% if the company is founded after 2011).

As a result, in early 2023 office occupancy plateaued at around half pre-covid levels, and hasn’t budged since.

The debate about what our return home means continues.

Advocates for home working generally rely on arguments around flexibility and wellbeing, while proponents of office-based working see them as the only places where true performance occurs.

I want to flip this on its head.

The idea of the home as a sanctuary for work-life balance is wrong.

For much of the work that knowledge workers now do, the office has become a drag on human productivity.

As a result, the home is returning to what it was in the Barings’ day: the place where the actual work gets done.

A necessary tool in the arsenal of anyone, or any company, that wants to do great work and build great things.

But to figure out how we can once again unlock the true home’s true potential, we have to figure out what went wrong with the office.

Jensen Huang v the New York Times

Let’s start with perhaps the peak of the office’s domination: the second half of the 20th century.

At this point, to work from home was to be an adherent of a fringe concept, espoused by a coalition of futurists and social theorists.

One of those futurists was Alvin Toffler, who in his 1980 book, the Third Wave, wrote of the potential of what he called the “electronic cottage” (aka, a home you could actually work from):

“Today it takes an act of courage to suggest that our biggest factories and office towers may, within our lifetimes, stand half empty, reduced to use as ghostly warehouses or converted into living space. Yet this is precisely what the new mode of production makes possible: a return to cottage industry on a new, higher, electronic basis, and with it a new emphasis on the home as the centre of society.”

Today Toffler might seem like he was pretty prescient, but for the four decades afterwards, his views essentially remained science fiction.

Even during the rise of the internet, home working remained a fringe pursuit: in the UK in 2009 just 2.3% of the working population meaningfully worked from home; and a call in 2012 by the UK government for people to work from home during the Olympics was met with bemusement.

In fact - by the mid-2010s - even the fringe adopters of working from home had largely written it off: with companies including IBM, Best Buy, and Yahoo all jettisoning their home-working programmes in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis.

In July 2020, with the pandemic in full swing, the New York Times described the history of working from home as “strewn with failure.”

The article’s final prediction? “We’ll be back in the office as soon as there’s a vaccine.”

However, a different position was emerging.

A month before the New York Times article was published, Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, was interviewed by VentureBeat. He too was asked what he thought would happen once the pandemic was over.

He saw things a little differently to the New York Times:

“I think we’re going to have people who work from home a couple of days a week, three days a week, four days a week. And I’m perfectly comfortable with all that.”

Fast forward five years, it’s clear that we can add this prediction into the growing body of evidence in favour of never betting against Jensen Huang.

It’s now, I think, very difficult to disagree with Goldman Sachs’ assessment that “remote work appears likely to be the most persistent economic legacy of the pandemic.”

A modest executive car

It’s worth pausing for a moment to question this: why, when pretty much everything else has reverted back to how it was before, has home working stayed?

The first reason is technological: it’s only very recently that the kit that lets us easily work at home has been around.

British Telecom, in their 1986 in-house journal, detailed a groundbreaking pilot where they planned to install a computer with an internet connection into a home in rural Oxfordshire:

“The first [BT} line would be used for ordinary telephone calls and Prestel, and the other for use with a communicating workstation: a combined computer and telephone with built-in modem. [...] Compact units carrying the Merlin Tonto, a printer and the Merlin combined Fax and photocopier could all be easily packed away into a cupboard overnight if required, yet provide the businessman with all his needs.”

The real kicker? The cost of setup, billed as highly affordable, came at just under “half the cost of even a modest executive car.” Bargain.

Even in the age of the iPhone, leaders had to work very hard if they wanted to build distributed teams.

Here’s Matt Mullenweg, remote work pioneer, and founder of Automattic (read: Wordpress), describing what it felt like in the company’s early days: :

“The tools at the time were very rough. It was IRC, I think we used Skype if we ever did calls, but not very much. And in the subsequent 15 years since Automattic started, it’s gotten so easy and so good.”

If Covid had been around in 1986, where each home office setup came up to the equivalent of half today’s BMW 320i, we’d have all been back to the office in a flash.

In Automattic’s early days there probably would have been a few early adopters who stuck the course, but not enough to cross the chasm.

But in 2020, we were far enough along in terms of technology that we were able to stick the landing: an advantage that’s only grown.

Pen Drivers

The second, and perhaps more important reason why home working has stuck is that the type of work we do now is very different to that for which the office was originally invented.

Just compare the lives of a knowledge worker today with the OG office workers: clerks, the inky-fingered dwellers of Dickens novels.

Charles Lamb, 19th century poet, essayist, and clerk for the East India Company, wrote in 1821 a summary of his daily duties:

“to draw up the Buyers' Accounts both for the Company and Private Trade; to enter all deposits on Company and Private Trade goods in the Fair Books, ensuring that the amounts agreed with those entered in the Clearing Books and the Treasury Deposit Books; to keep a ledger of short and over payments, notifying buyers of such errors and settling them; to reconcile the total amount of all Private Trade sales with the amounts actually received in the Treasury; and to give a general attention to the business of the Journals.”

Lamb might have been a knowledge worker, but for him, as with most knowledge workers of history, the job was not generating knowledge, but copying, verifying, and disseminating. By hand. Every day. For over thirty years.

This type of work now seems unimaginably unproductive. But it was work, and what offices were designed to facilitate.

In a world where work was all about sharing information, to do so at any speed meant people needed to be in close proximity to each other.

This work was also extremely difficult to motivate people to do. Here’s Lamb describing, in another letter, how he felt about his life as a clerk:

“You don’t know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief, day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four, without ease or interposition.”

Almost a century on, the life of a clerk hadn’t gotten much better. Here’s Shan Bullock, in 1907, describing the clerk’s condition:

“Pen drivers - miserable little pen drivers - fellows in black coats with inky fingers and shiny seats on their trousers - that’s what we are.”

This was your life: for six days a week, bar a day off for Christmas and Easter, and four days holiday a year.

Of course this meant employers needed to keep an eye on people, to ensure they weren’t shirking: employees in the East India Company offices during Lamb’s time had to sign in every 15 minutes during the day.

It goes without saying that the world of the modern knowledge worker is vastly different to that of Charles Lamb or the early clerks.

As ledgers have been replaced with spreadsheets, and hours labouring with a pen replaced by Ctrl+V, more and more jobs have moved further up the cognitive stack.

To put some numbers on that, courtesy of Morgan Housel:

“Thirty-eight percent of jobs are now designated as “managers, officials, and professionals.” These are decision-making jobs. Another 41% are service jobs that often rely on your thoughts as much as your actions.”

This kind of world demands a wholly different approach to work: one more akin to the Barings of this world, than the Lambs.

It’s also a way of working where the home can far outcompete the office: becoming once again the location where the most important, most creative work happens.

This is what we’ll turn to next.

aled@ashore.io