Well. It’s been a while hasn’t it? We’re in this thing called “lockdown”, if you hadn’t noticed, and while that should have made it easier to get writing, my mind has been pre-occupied with fears about dying, losing my job, whether the box-sets on Amazon and Netflix will get better and whether or not I can still actually put any written prose together.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. He could have done a strikethrough on the word “house” before replacing it with “office” for comedy effect, and you’d be concluding that Ben has lost his comic talents, if not his ability to refer to himself in the third person. You’d be wrong.
What has happened is that I can’t work out how to do a strikethrough. And, I spend so much time in my house typing at a computer thanks to the working from home bonanza, that the idea of typing at a computer in the spare time, that is also in my house, fills me with dread.
Which got me thinking. About jobs. About what I like. I really do like my day job. I work in social housing. It’s ok. But 20 years ago, or thereabouts, so it goes, I had my first proper job (ignoring Perfect Pizza in Chatham, or as I liked to call it, Imperfect Pizza), and that was in Commercial Real Estate for a FTSE250 Property Developer (or at least, the agency attached to said company, linked solely by the partners being directors of the former, and the rules on such things for service charges being different to what they are now).
I am doing it a bit of a disservice. They were a great firm. Their name was Pilcher Hershman and Partners, and I joined them in 1999, at a time when the parent company which wasn’t a parent company was growing, and growing fast.
Derwent Valley as they were known then, prior to their merger with London Securities, specialised, and still do, in finding run down old buildings in less-fashionable parts of London and making them into exactly the sort of place that the 1999-2000 dotcom bubble companies loved. Clerkenwell, Islington, Farringdon. Everything was just about walkable from the office. It taught me a lot, my time there. How I hated commuting, wished I could afford to live in London, and how my knack for knowing how a lease worked and basic surveying skills might serve me better in an altogether more altruistic career in social housing. I was wrong. Anyway. enough about me, and on to what caught my eye. It was this.
Now, when I told the senior partner at Pilcher Hershman that I was leaving because I had this dream of working on the homeless desk at a provincial local authority, he was pretty good about it. He was once listed, legend has it, as one of Britain’s most eligible bachelors. Days before my 21st birthday, he saw me out the front of our office on Savile Row.
So I hear you’re leaving us? he said to me
I nodded. I told him I loved working there (which was a small lie, because I was actually massively unsuited to the accidental promotion I had to Management Surveyor from Office Junior, and the commute from the provincial town in North Kent was killing me). I told him as much as I loved working there, I wanted to use my skills to give something back. Help people out who are in need of good housing. Set them up right. Be kind.
There’s a lot of that, he told me, in what we do here. We make fantastic office spaces, so that when people come to work, they’re happy. They’re productive. They want to come to work.
When he told me that, 21 year old me, out of his depth in terms of both social skills and understanding nodded, while my brain said “help”. The bit of the job that I saw didn’t do that. I chased the rent (silly money tbh), and organised the repairs, and occasionally took my life in my hands by walking around on rooftops in Covent Garden, Soho and Camden just to check for leaks while not really knowing my downpipes from my hopper-heads (full discosure – this was twenty years ago, and health and safety had not at that point lost its marbles / began to exist to protect people from themselves depending on your viewpoint on Brexit)
Thanks David, I said, for all the opportunities. I do like working here, it’s just time to give something back. I had convinced myself of that. This foray to a local authority, on half the money (it was an entry level position that paid significantly less than what I earned in the big smoke), was entirely because I wanted to help out those less fortunate, and nothing to do with the fact that I was exhausted, sinking in a world my mind did not understand, and tired to the point of falling asleep at my desk which I would do if only the phone would stop ringing and the yellow “message for you post-its” would stop arriving.
But.
He.
Was right.
As I grew older, and clearly sorted my head out, and surprised myself by becoming a pretty decent middle-manager who gets results by keeping a skilled team happy, I had a think. The similarities were there. Yes, now my job is making sure my employer are compliant and that we don’t have any fatalities, and that people try to do the right thing by their neighbour and when they don’t there are consequences, but it is similar. No, you bastards, it is. And I will explain why.
We spend (or, until Covid, spent) as much if not more time in our workplaces as we do in our homes. Most workplaces are awful. Proper horrid. Those big offices that are glass boxes that wouldn’t look out of place next to an international airport. The identikit shop units. Offices with no light and dirty toilets where the highlight of the day other than home time is the bit where you meet someone you’ve not met before in the kitchen, have a chat, and then forget their name.
Derwent, and of course the agent, Pilcher Hershman, made offices that could have been done as a riposte to the almost Ballardian horror of what modern life can be. An antidote to the humdrum and banal. Two fingers to turning up and knowing your place. They made, and still make, places where you want to go to work. I will probably be doing more about that another time, but I am thinking primarily the Tea Building, Morelands and the White Collar Factory. Great buildings. Expertly done.
Now, Wicklow Street, isn’t a Derwent building, (sorry, I went right off on a tangent), but the reason it is interesting (which justifies its inclusion on here) is two-fold. This is the sort of project I saw on both this scale all those years ago, and also on a much bigger scale, again, all those years ago. It’s a repurposed building in an area that nobody else was really looking at. All those years ago, David Rosen (the senior partner at Pilcher Hershman) was walking round, as the Evening Standard put it, like an old gumshoe, hunting out London’s hidden gems, for John Burns and Simon Silver at Derwent Valley to work their magic on and make into something that was not only highly desirable and profitable, but also beautiful. All those years ago, King’s Cross was, to be blunt, an absolute shit-hole.
Now, Derwent and Pilcher Hershman can’t take credit for the transformation of King’s Cross. That was very much led by the GLA. But this building is typical of the sort of place where you’d like to go to work.
Let’s look inside…
Now, this is on the side of King’s Cross that is actually a bit behind the big regeneration of King’s Cross. This is the south side of King’s Cross that still has £20 a night hotels and fleas. But with that it still has independent cafes, independent shops and a few, only a few, normal people who frequent them. It’s also got boozers, and the fabulously reinvigorated King’s Cross Station, as well as the grandeur of neighbouring St John Betjeman Pancras. Both of which are incredibly well connected.
Now, what else is interesting about this? Well, just look at it. Do it. Look at it. It’s an old stables and warehouse from when this particular part of the northernmost bit of Central London before you start hitting the suburbs was a busy, industrial place. When horses did the work. When horses clip-clopped down the streets. When normal people had baths two times a year and stepped in horse-shit two times a day. When somewhere this close to the centre of the city (you can walk to the west end in half an hour) was a working district inhabited by the working poor. Oh goodness, my innate socialism just fell out didn’t it? Sorry.
You know what I mean though. You do. It’s got something that so many new buildings, be they the flat-pack houses that we might get 40 years out of popping up left, right and all over the shop, the airport hotels or the out of town leisure parks don’t have. It’s got character. You walk up to this and you feel like you did well to get a job where you get to go in here. And it was built, not out of necessity, but out of the fact that even then, an architect and a builder knew that it was important to be aesthetically pleasing as well as functional. Of course, I am a Housing Officer and the latter bits there are guesswork and romance. But you know what I mean.
And now, what, 130-140 years later, it’s had a refresh. And it is still aesthetically pleasing. It is definitely functional. And if you’re the sort of small creative firm that can spare half your staff working from home (which is how it will be forever now), while the other half hot desk in here where you can smell the history in the bricks, where they’re bathed in the light, and they want to come in on the days that you make them, then perhaps, just perhaps (let’s face it, those people are probably not reading this), you should give Pilcher Hershman a call.
46 Wicklow Street, King’s Cross, is being marketed by both Pilcher Hershman and Partners (to whom I have a bias, but from who I have not received any money or favour since July 2001) and Situu (yes, double vowel ending). I stole (strikethrough competency required again here) / borrowed all the images from Pilcher Hershman’s website. You can contact them on 020 7399 8600 (sadly, I didn’t even have to look that up because I can still remember it), and ask for David Jackson or Julian Wogman. I worked with David for my time there. Nice bloke. I don’t know Julian, but presume he’s alright because everyone else there was at least a 7/10. And that’s what happens when you have a happy workforce in a great office.
Oh, and PHP people. If you want me to delete any of this due to the copyright issues, let me know. But the intention is good. Always good x
That's an Interesting House 