Editor’s Note: In the spirit of international cooperation, our friend Mark Eltringham, publisher of U.K.-based Works Magazine, is sharing his thoughts about Clerkenwell Design Week, a major design event held annually in London’s design-heavy Clerkenwell neighborhood. officeinsight magazine will share our thoughts about NeoCon and Design Days with Mark’s readers following the Chicago events.
It’s Thursday morning, 7:30 a.m., and day breaks on the final morning of Clerkenwell Design Week 2025. I am walking along Great Sutton Street to a breakfast meeting. This is the epicenter of what is arguably the world’s most concentrated agglomeration of showrooms dedicated to office design. Not that you’d know it at that time of the day. The binmen are out collecting vast bags of rubbish and the air is thick with the staling funk of spilled beer and wine.
I had been here the night before, gladhanding my way down a street thronged with the overspill from the showrooms and the two pubs that rely on them for a payday, The Sutton Arms and The Slaughtered Lamb (yes, really). The weather has been unseasonably fine for the UK. It always helps.
The question it all begs is whether this is the hangover from a celebration, or the drowning of sorrows. And the answer appears to be a bit of both.
This has been a necessarily challenging five years for the office sector. But there are reasons to be cheerful, not least in the shape of a market that appears to have stabilized, if not exactly recovered and found new and better ways of engaging with clients.
The main thing is that there are signs that we have achieved a degree of equilibrium in the tedious to and fro between WFH and RTO. Business districts are busy again but not all the time, with Fridays especially dead. I am told by at least two major multinationals who are specifying major office developments that the design principles they would have applied in 2019 still apply, including a focus on desks. Hybrid Working maestro Nick Bloom of Stanford thinks that the split between in-office and remote working appears to have stabilized, in North America at least.
So, there are some things that mitigate the challenges faced by the sector, although it is too early to declare them sources of optimism. Consequently, there are small indications of confidence returning in a generation of excellent, if not exactly groundbreaking, new products.
Perhaps most notable is the way the sector has rethought the way it uses its showrooms. There is a well-founded perception that products and a warm welcome are no longer enough to entice people to step inside. The routine of after works drinks to share ideas, tales and banter may be a longstanding British tradition, but it is a much diminished one in the wake of the pandemic. This applies as much to Clerkenwell as the rest of society.
The upshot is that firms need to work harder to lure people into their very expensive spaces. Food is one way. Puppies are another, as Umbrella tried successfully in its very impressive showcase. Ergonomics specialist Hat Collective invited people to assemble a monitor arm blindfolded, only to find at least one person was able to do it in seconds, in a way reminiscent of the gun assembly scene in the film “Forrest Gump.”
Milliken also likes to take a hands-on approach alongside its panel talks. This year visitors were invited to make paper mobiles and take part in installations exploring patterns with an artist and illustrator called Rob Lowe who also rejoices in the name Supermundane.
Yet the main source of footfall remains the panel talk. By definition, these vary in quality, depending on the calibre of the speakers, the intrigue of the premise and what else is going on at the same time. Even well-trodden ground such as sustainability, color and wellbeing can be invigorated with a high-profile speaker, some lively audience interaction and a new perspective.
To facilitate these dialogues, a number of existing showrooms have been revamped such as those of major European office pioneers like Flokk, Senator, Bisley, Nowy Styl, Naughtone and Sedus. Many others have been occupied by relocated tenants including Orangebox, MillerKnoll and KI. All these firms and others like them are offering more value to clients by creating spaces that are as much about creating narratives and exploring ideas as they are showcasing products. Even in a hothouse like Clerkenwell, clients need a reason to get out and about.
Acoustics is still a much talked about subject, although the obsession with pods that arose in the immediate wake of the pandemic seems to have settled into something more measured and interesting. Just as those millions of tons of useless Perspex (or Plexiglas in the U.S.) screens that sprang up all over the world during lockdown seem to have been both memory-holed and consigned to actual holes as landfill, so too have a large number of hastily-assembled pod products.
What we are left with is a generation of increasingly sophisticated products from the people who were already creating acoustic solutions before we got so edgy about being around each other. At Clerkenwell, this part of the market is superbly represented by the likes of Mute, Framery, Kabin, Sedus and Flokk. Tangential solutions such as lumenear acoustic lighting, represented in the U.K. by Vepa, show how a complex, multi-faceted workplace problem needs something a lot smarter than an upright coffin to make things better.
Another conversation that seems to have been reinvigorated is that on sustainability. I’ll put this down to people having found better ways of thinking and talking about two aspects of it all; process and materials. Partly this is because clients appear to be much better at spotting greenwash and B.S. And it’s also because the industry has got much better at what it does and the way it talks about it.
The push and pull of higher demands from clients and better solutions from the sector was evident in one talk I chaired in the showroom of Shaw Contract on the subject of circularity. This was my kind of gig because all I really had to do was prompt an engaged audience and the extremely knowledgeable speakers including Andrea Charlson of Madaster and Penny Quraishi of the International WELL Building Institute and the whole thing ran itself. Shaw itself has a new product that proves the point about the importance of process and materials in the development of EcoWorx Resilient, a PVC-free fully closed loop recyclable alternative to Luxury Vinyl Tile.
Meanwhile, Flokk staged an installation developed with Hunting & Narud called Every. Piece. Counts., which focussed on how the choice of materials and manufacturing processes can have a “systemic impact” on the issue of sustainability.
This emerging way of talking about sustainability relies on the energy of its champions. Two of the most prominent in the U.K. are Joanna Knight and Harsha Kotak who are the co-founders of both the Sustainable Design Collective and Women in Office Design. Passion counts for a lot when coupled with in-depth knowledge of an issue and these guys have both in spades. Check them out, if you don’t know them already.
Another newish organization to look out for is Material Source, who showcase curated products in its showrooms and conference spaces. They originate in Manchester, but now also have spaces in Edinburgh, London and are looking to open their next space in Dublin. Many of the themes evident during Clerkenwell Design Week can be explored year-round in their showrooms.
Clerkenwell Design Week is as much about what you didn’t get the chance to see as what you did. The conference program was yet again curated by the extremely knowledgeable and well-connected Katie Richardson. Headline speakers included Thomas Heatherwick, who discussed human-centered urban space, and Yinka Ilori, whose bold, joyful work challenges traditional design narratives. Other speakers included Dutch innovator Nienke Hoogvliet on algae-based materials, and Julia Barfield, co-designer of the London Eye, on adaptive reuse and the narrative of architecture.
If you need a takeaway from the show this year, it might be this: The industry has become very good indeed at telling a story about itself. After five challenging years, let’s hope this one has a happy ending.