The Walls Work Too
Way back when we founded Work Club, we explored how a space shaped the creative work and the club culture.
Now, way past post pandemic, with hybrid working, and AI, ‘earning the commute’ and creating a place of community seems even more valuable.
Win One, Teach One.
— Co-founded and scaled a digital innovation hotshop to ~100 people, acquired by Havas in 2014.
— Campaign’s Digital Agency of the Year 2012, with work for Google, Coca-Cola, McLaren, Land Rover, and Heineken.
— Frontier ideas in creative technology, data, and product design before they became standard practice.
Work Club’s office opened in a South London hop warehouse, able to trace its history back 300 years. It was stuck in the 70s when we found it.
Think of it as a scout hut, meets tech hub… with cheap rent.
We gutted the 4000sqft single room, added a really odd carpet, and a nice big kitchen with a nice big dining table.
...and put a nice big logo on the wall. So we couldn’t forget.
Although bootstrapped, we dropped a load into an office for ~70 people for a business at the time ~8. Back yourself. Create the place you want to be, to attract the people to help you make it.
The space was good for work, and good for club. Good for gigs, after parties, pets and swordfights.
Against one wall we put a bleacher. $6000, shipped over, self assembly. Set up opposite a big screen. Great for company meetings, daytime 80s films, or just sitting nice and high and looking down on people. We thought it would be great for client presentations, but it wasn’t.
Along the 22m blackboard wall Matt, Tom and Mathieu had the idea to write every one of Bart’s lines, and made it happen with indefatigable illustrator Mat Williams and James Haworth of Hungryman.
Turns out writing fuck big on a wall causes no problems whatsoever, luxury clients included. DFIU was the unwritten company motto, whispered sotto, before important meetings. We wondered if it could be written beautifully. Jack Hollands & Nick Garrett proved it could.
A few years later becoming Havas Work Club we moved into their Fitzrovia offices and did it again. Same brief, write hard words nice, this time LA Ronayne commissioned Fanakapan’s metallic graffiti balloons.
Back up a few years, back in our tech scout hut, we wrote A C L U B M A K E S F O R G O O D B U S I N E S Z above the bleacher. Club wasn’t just about being good to people, it was about being good for business.
In time we rebranded and refurbed, a bit. A new Work Club badge, with space for HAVAS, and a new glass door. The door gave a tightly framed noisy view inside, as you walked in we wanted you to look up, so we wrote HELLO on the roof.
Then we put this Murakami quote on the door handle, to let you know what you were walking into. Look down, read the storm, look up, hello!
Always wary of valueless company values, we wrote some anti-values. And of course, wrote them on the wall.
The walls we didn’t write on, got written on anyway. Work in progress up everywhere. Yes, that’s a big snake.
Next we created rooms that looped. Small spaces with continuous curved white walls to write on, open enough to let curious people wander in, closed enough to focus when inside.
It ran on. Off walls. Onto notebooks, all important new mug briefs, and the bread/phone meeting bin. I particular liked the red duct tape trail all the way from the street to help important clients find us.
When we joined Havas London in Fitzrovia so did the words… floor two welcomed you with part inspiration, part Eastwood threat, and we gave the lifts an opinion of their own.
One meeting room we named Salford after Salford FC, which we rebranded, borrowing Anthony H Wilson’s great line, and Mooge hung a days-since-last-accident sign in the creative department.
And lastly we wrote the line from my D&AD manifesto on the front window.
10 years later, 2017, Havas moved everything into HKX. A excellent new 11 storey ‘Village’ on Granary Square, Kings Cross. Very shiny and clean.
