“To some extent, it's an overhead that you don’t really want to take on, it's to start paying rent, but almost aspiring to be part of a commercial community with people who pay rent and sort of have an office [...] it's kind of like a commercial status to having your workspace.”

“We chose this space for a couple of things, so, first of all, they’ve [Hotel Elephant] done quite well here, you’ve got different tiers of capacity of using the space. So we’ve got dedicated desks in a lockable office, which is great, it's only on a monthly rolling contract - it's excellent for us if we want to expand and hire desk space. For instance, this month we paid [someone] to join us, and that’s great for us because we can do that really elastically, whereas if we were in a more conventional sort of 6-month lease, 12-month lease and beyond, it's really difficult to expand in the short term.”

“This building is really well fitted out [...] it is kind of low cost to fit out office space, it is also really comfortable.[...]it's not a conventional sort of creative workspace, which is basically poured concrete floor, really bloody cold most of the time and sort of extension leads running across the floor, you trip over; that wasn’t what we were looking for.”

“The other tenants are construction companies. Previously there was a really interesting charity start-up, so more on the kind of desk-based side of commercial industries, creative industries [...] NHS is using one of the spaces next door. The offices at their front, for instance, are the kind of desk-based industry, so like hardly creative at all - I think that [creative industry] is more of an aspiration than a governing thing. Maybe they stick the architects in the front so it looks more like it's a creative workspace.[...] And the others [not in the front] then are a kind of those ... more rough and ready, basically sculptors, puppet makers.”

“I think actually [to access this space] we might have seen a Facebook advert, but, we called in and we were in within 2 days.”

“We didn’t choose this workspace in particular [cause it looked onto the street], but I would go as far as saying potentially might not have necessarily taken this opportunity [because people] tap on my window and scare the crap out of me while I’m doing a drawing [...] it's really important to me actually to have like a shop front and that’s not necessarily in that sort of typical sense people mean that, you know, you get passing trade. It's not so much that, it's more that I find it personally really important to be not like within a hive, bang in the middle of a bunch of other creatives, it's not really what I’m looking for [...] it feels more like our office actually, because we’ve got a little window to the street and I’ve got daylight, it makes a difference.”

“I hear a lot of people having conversations about their work, so when they’re on the phone - it's a good thing rather than a bad thing. Partly why we're here as well. [The walls between offices don’t go all the way up so] every now and again somebody will come and give me a knock and say I hear you’ve got an issue with that client again, like what’s going on there, which is quite nice. It's a bit less lonely than being at home - so it feels a bit more part of something.[...but at the same time] we miss being able to play music.”

“It is not about being around other creatives necessarily. I find it more interesting when other people around us are doing something which is in some sense, not so purely administrative, but the point really is […] to kind of be around people who are working on their own thing and that’s the main kind of compulsion, really.”

“The space is actually really not policed at all, there aren’t rules that I’m aware of, it's purely neighbourly.[...] it is open constantly, so we're given keys to use this space whenever we'd like to. Although we probably wouldn’t choose to use it at particular because the heating goes off so it's bloody cold.”

“It's a really amazing place, like geographically, because we're as you know, still close to Elephant, which is kind of an interesting place at the moment, but this is such a quiet, kind of well-conceived street, and these railway arches are particularly, in a little recess back from the city; so you're still within the grab of Walworth Road, but I feel like we really benefit from the two dynamics. Also, I’m a 10-minute walk away, so it's great.[...] just being within a shout of the Tube and being able to get on it whilst wearing a suit, basically is really important.”

“The café is great - one of our great benefits is we get free coffee from the café, which is really nice, like a massive perk. […] and we're served there, there’s not like a tea point for instance. So we cross paths with lots of other people using the workspaces quite well, and you see them quite frequently. I think one of the fundamental truths of these situations where you share workspace is that you do need a reason to cross paths with people. It doesn’t just happen really, cause people are busy. They [the café] offer free beers, you know, at 6 o’clock on a Friday, to everybody who's in, and there are a couple of quite neat ways they work out for people to cross paths quite passively, rather than doing like a meet and greet.[...] that is quite a good way of engendering like a soft kind of sense of community.”

“This [arch] is quite well designed; they’re quite smart how their offices bloat out and conceal like the toilets at the back, for instance, and this [space] appears as quite like an appealing workspace, and that does work quite well from a spatial perspective.”

“We don’t have any kind of influence really on how the space is managed. […] We tend to police things internally, so, say for instance one of the offices just weren’t cleaning their coffee cups, which was really annoying cause we still share a sink. We’ve talked about that internally. I mean, it never really goes beyond that - we haven’t been subject to any comment from above either. That’s one of the things that’s quite enjoyable really, is we’ve got a little bit of autonomy. It does feel like our office in that sense.”

“They’ve [the managers] almost been empowered by whoever the funders were, and they in no way impose themselves. I think they probably could if they had issues with other tenants, but that’s not the dynamic really. It also feels as if, to some extent, they’re people who also use the workspace, as much as landlords.”

“I think you could find cheaper desk space if you wanted to, but we pay 350 per dedicated desk a month which relative to, maybe some of the more recognisable co-work spaces like WeWork, is actually really cheap. But relative to [others] we're a bit more expensive than that.”

“We've adapted the furniture and we organised our space. The good thing is the partitions work well because, whilst they don’t offer you any acoustic privacy, they just define a boundary. They’re just quite good, [...] predominantly practical.”

“We would like to stay here for the foreseeable short to mid-term. I mean it's strange to think of us being here for more than maybe a year or two.”