London's Global Office Economy: From Clerical Factory to Digital Hub
is a timely and comprehensive study of the office from the very
beginnings of the workplace to its post-pandemic future. The book takes
the reader on a journey through five ages of the office, encompassing
sixteenth-century coffee houses and markets, eighteenth-century clerical
factories, the corporate offices emerging in the nineteenth, to the
digital and network offices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
While offices might appear ubiquitous, their evolution and role in the
modern economy are among the least explained aspects of city
development. One-third of the workforce uses an office; and yet the
buildings themselves - their history, design, construction, management
and occupation - have received only piecemeal explanation, mainly in
specialist texts. This book examines everything from paper clips and
typewriters, to design and construction, to workstyles and urban
planning to explain the evolution of the 'office economy'.
Using London as a backdrop, Rob Harris provides built environment
practitioners, academics, students and the general reader with a
fascinating, illuminating and comprehensive perspective on the office.
Readers will find rich material linking fields that are normally treated
in isolation, in a story that weaves together the pressures exerting
change on the businesses that occupy office space with the motives and
activities of those who plan, supply and manage it.
Our unfolding understanding of offices, the changes through which they
have passed, the nature of office work itself and its continuing
evolution is a fascinating story and should appeal to anyone with an
interest in contemporary society and its relationship with work.
