“I guess you can just sit wherever, really,” the woman says, seeming a little nonplussed as she gestures at the dozens of empty tables. I booked a slot at this London pub on its “work from the pub” scheme, but it seems I needn’t have bothered with the planning. I am the only customer in here. Which makes sense – because this is a pub, and it’s 11am on a Tuesday.
Trouble is brewing for pubs. Earlier this year there were 7,000 fewer of them in England and Wales than a decade ago. Pubs were bruised by the pandemic, and now, like all hospitality venues, they are staring down the barrel of the cost of living crisis, which will mean vastly increased energy bills and customers with less beer money in their pockets. More than 70% of pubs do not expect to survive the winter, according to one survey.
So, they need to get us through their doors any way they can. One of these ways is by encouraging people like me, who work from home, to work at the pub instead. Remote-working deals, which Fuller’s and Young’s pubs up and down the country are offering, are a formalised version of what many people without an office have had to do between meetings, or when their boiler is broken: set up shop in their local to hammer out some emails. For £15 at this particular pub – prices vary elsewhere – you get a desk (read: classically wonky, tacky-to-the-touch pub table), a plug socket, unlimited tea or coffee and something for lunch.
That I had most of the pub to myself may have had something to do with the fact that – despite what the website said – the scheme hadn’t officially started yet, and the staff hadn’t been informed about it. “See, sometimes [they] just do things and don’t tell us about it,” one worker said, rolling their eyes. They kindly agreed to do it for me anyway.
So, what is it like working from the pub for an entire working day? First, “entire working day” is difficult to achieve given that most pubs generally don’t open until 11, if not 12, and while I am a lazy, good-for-nothing freelancer, I’m not that lazy or good for nothing. (Some on the scheme say they will be opening from 10am.) And, as I can attest to from my time working in a pub, the morning period should really belong to the staff. It’s when they can put on the music a bit louder, chat behind the bar, and do their admin tasks before anybody shows up, about lunchtime. Other downsides include the fact that it does just smell like a pub: that sweet, musty tang of beer and barbecue sauce. And if you need to take a video call, it looks very much like you’re in the pub, too.
While we’re doing the downsides: for £15 you can eat much nicer food – I had a bruschetta remarkable for having no flavour at all (I have recently taken a Covid test), although perhaps that’s my fault for ordering bruschetta at a pub. And at home you don’t have to listen to Hey There Delilah while you work. That said, £15 isn’t bad , considering that hot-desking at somewhere like WeWork, for instance, costs £240 a month, but you have to pay for the whole month and bring your own lunch. And after the first couple of hours, I do manage to sort of forget I’m in the pub at all and focus enough to get some work done. Also, the availability of a glass of red wine whenever I decided it was acceptable to order one did make the afternoon pass quickly. I’m not sure how scaleable this working day is, though, if you’re the kind to succumb to the temptation too readily.
So although working from home is, of course, cheaper, I did indeed get things done, perhaps more than I would have done at home, where I can convince myself that it is imperative I dye my eyebrows right now instead of responding to a difficult request from an editor, or put my face within two centimetres of my cat’s and whisper: “I love you.” Unlike at home, it would feel like an act of psychopathy to sit here during a lunch hour that turns into a lunch hour-and-a-half and stare listlessly at old Derren Brown videos on YouTube.
What makes me feel a bit uneasy about all this is that it’s hard not to read “work from the pub” as ominous writing on the wall, like all the adverts around at the moment that say: “We know things are awful – here’s how you can save a tiny bit of money.” Things are bad, not just for you but for everybody, and set to get worse. So sure, work from the pub and have a beer at 4pm. Or two. Anything to numb that low-rumbling anxiety about what the next few years are going to look like. Cheers!
Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist based in London
