I joined my firm in July 2005 to work in the London office in Tavistock Square. We had 3 or 4 floors of the building. It was cramped & uncomfortable. Thankfully in December 2006 we moved a much better office in Kings Cross where we had the whole building to ourselves. We were the first tenants & managed the fit out ourselves, to suit ourselves. It was at the time, fresh & new with good facilities including, after a few months, a free bar for all the staff & clients for a few hours every Wednesday & Thursday evening. Kings Cross has been significantly transformed over the years with lots of new places to eat & drink.
We are relocating our London office in June to Fenchurch Street.
We've had our current office partially open since about August last year for those who were struggling to WFH but take up has been pretty low & recently with the current lock down, very low, so we've taken the decision to close our Kings Cross office imminently.
I went in today to collect my personal belongings & get any filing that really needed to be kept, archived.
Firstly the commute was very quiet - virtually empty train to Waterloo, ditto on the Underground and very few people on the streets.
Then I got to the office. What was once a bustling, often exciting place to work for 600+ people was pretty well dead, with huge recycling bags, rubbish bags & storage boxes everywhere. It was nice to say hi to a few colleagues who were in doing the same as me, but I'm going to really miss the old place. It's been a big part of my life over the last 14 and a bit years. I've had ups & downs of course, but my career has progressed pretty well in that time, I've mostly loved the work and I've absolutely loved helping to develop so many talented staff during my time there, plus some of the team socials have been epic. Due to this dammed pandemic, there will be no last hurrah party.
However great our new office will be (we have 2 floors of 14) it won't be our own building & with the likely move to most people WFH 2 to 4 days a week, I wonder if it will ever have the same buzz that came from working together in our old team areas.
I wasn't looking forward to today, but I'm a lot sadder than I expected to be.
Still life goes on & I'm a very lucky man in so many ways.
I don't suppose this will be a very interesting post for most, but it's been cathartic for me to write it.