“The space is not ideal but the location is very good […] We had another business, which was based out in Essex, but it could take us 2 to 3 hours to get into central London and it just did not work cause then you end up charging your clients loads of money, then we don’t get any business […] the space was far better, cause it was more organised and bigger, however, the location was bad, but over here, the type of space we’ve got is very difficult to work with. You have to work through 3 arches. You're in and out of arches, we haven’t got much sort of height space, phone signal is a problem, cause you get like no signal in here”

“The curving walls are a nightmare. I mean we're up here now, it's not a nice environment to be in, but yeah, it does limit us. And plus having no windows. It would be nice to have windows.”

“We would love to stay in this location but we just could not operate the way we are. We're growing; we grew 30% this year and there’s no way in the next 2 years [to stay here]. We gonna need to move out [...] we're actually trying to change the style of business we do so we can sort of do more work out of London, because we're dependent on the location we are, right now.”

“Everything that we do we're allowed, but you’re not allowed to do like car mechanics and spraying and things like that, but we're generally fine […] we’ve had extra bits fitted to our shutter.”

“The type of work has changed; we're trying to do less work with higher value. And the equipment's also changed to meet those needs […] do you know the large scale LED screens you see in exhibitions and stuff? we do a lot of that now. We can do lighting, but it's mainly large format screen - big projections, LED lighting, and a lot of audio staging, so there’s quite a lot of them. ”

“There’s no real solid contract, there’s more a tenancy agreement. So in 3 months, they [landowners] could say: 'we're gonna double your rent', but they have no leg to stand on.”

“Everyone’s started bringing their own lunch in, cause the quality of the food round here is fairly poor. There are a few decent cafes opened up, but they’re very expensive. So, most people just bring their own lunch in, plus we're super busy, so we end up staying in here, unfortunately, in this place […] We've actually brought our own proper coffee machine downstairs now, so we have our own coffee.”

“The two other tenants next door are the only ones we know. […] Next door to him there is a theatre company that supply like staging and weights and things for theatres [...] I think everyone down here is in the events industry. It's great for central London.”

“Since we’ve been here, those flats have been put up in front of us, and since they’ve been put up, they’ve been a lot of complaints about our shutters going up and down, the noise […] But still, we've sort of been here before them, and now they’re moaning about us - which is fine, I understand they’ve got to live here, but we're an operating business and we can only operate out of here cause all our clients are in central London.”

“We are the local contacts for Borough Market, so we do all the events in Borough Market, for V&A museum, we do all their work, loads of banks in central London, there's lots of venues that we do, I can't name - I can't remember all the names, but a lot of them are frequent and central London based. [...] [from] start-outs through to exhibition organisers, through to museums and places, across the board, but like the whole thing really.”

“I think it [the rent] is fair. I don’t think it's over compared to some areas. I think Network Rail, they have been fairly good, but looking at the recent properties coming up, when they do come up they’re sometimes double the price of what we're paying here, so they are going up rampantly […] this unit is 50% cheaper than the other unit, and that unit it's 50% cheaper than the recent unit we’ve got, so they’ve doubled […] the rent is not secure, they could change it.”

“Parking is also a major issue. We only get I think two allocations per unit. luckily, we’ve got three units now so we get six [parking], but we’ve got four vehicles. And then plus staff vehicles. That’s a lot of in and out [...][the space outside] that’s for loading and parking, and walking to the station and back.”

“We looked online and we couldn’t find much [space], and we drove around London and we literally saw a sign, and we contacted them, and it was actually really difficult to try and get in contact with someone that would actually show us the viewing [...] it was a bid to try and get the place […] they had a list of people and we had to sort of try and give them the best quote and the best offer, and go from there.”

“All our work is on the marketing side so it's mainly the internet, we've got very good website, we get lots of visitors. And then it's just us grabbing the phones here, grabbing chats coming in and we're dealing with them direct, and then we get a lot of repeat business. […] There is [a lot of word of mouth] beginning in the last few years, definitely, because we’ve gone quite unique with our products and stuff, so not many people have it, so people use us for that, and they spread the word.”

“Heating and cooling is also a problem cause you can't put air conditioning in it or anything like that, so we're working in sort of tough conditions sometimes when it's really cold or really hot.”