Cool places to work when London is hot
Air-conditioned pubs, cafes and libraries (mostly) with architectural flair and where you can hear yourself think
UCL East Marshgate — the coolest place to fire up a laptop
London was not built for intense heat. Air conditioning on trains and in stations is feeble and on buses it’s switched off. Most tube lines have none at all. On Tuesday, when the temperature reached 34 degrees, the capital’s grey concrete and black asphalt absorbed the sun’s energy, turning the city into a pollution-filled furnace. People fled to Stratford or Shepherd’s Bush to cower in the chilled halls of Westfield. Everyone looked bewildered. No one knew what to wear.
London will only get hotter, so we must adapt. Freelancers who roam the capital in search of a place to work — pubs, cafes, libraries and such where you can hear yourself think and with fast-enough WiFi — are adding aggressive air conditioning to our list of requirements (I know, I know, it’s wasteful), or at least high-powered fans, or a riverside breeze.
This summer I’m working on a lengthy project. I’m not lucky enough to be able to concentrate in clattery cafes; I need relative quiet for anything more demanding than grazing emails or the odd, quick telephone call.
But the upside to the broiling London summer is that the city empties like a clown car, which means the best places are quieter than usual. So in the spirit of unity, I’m sharing my top 10 chilled pubs, cafes and libraries. (I’m leaving out private members’ clubs, because you have to be approved or nominated or whatever to join them, and co-working spaces because they’re not my thing at all).
Most on the list are free and all are either well air-conditioned or near the river, or both. It’s unashamedly central, east and south London-centric. I hope it’s useful.
University College London East Marshgate in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park has it all: cavernous interiors, quiet public working areas with desks and power points and speedy WiFi. At this time of year when students are not around, it’s pretty much empty. The ground and atrium floors are open to anyone for free (details are here). This is a new-ish science, technology and innovation centre, which means there is a lot of gadgetry. In the ground-floor cafe, robot waiters deliver your lunch to your table. The building is by architects Stanton Williams, who also designed the Sainsbury Laboratory in Cambridge, which won the Stirling Prize in 2012.
The chilly atrium inside UCL East Marshgate: desks for anyone on the first floor
The Marshall Building, part of the London School of Economics at 44 Lincoln's Inn Fields, is another new campus building partly open to the public, again on the ground and first floors, what it calls the “informal study place”. In term time it’s crowded but in summer it’s largely deserted, with copious desks, some with cubicles, and breezy air conditioning. Grafton Architects won numerous awards for this building and the interiors are great, especially the staircase.
The Warburg Institute on Woburn Square must be one of the quietest, calmest interiors in central London. Its humanities library (“the world’s weirdest”) holds incredible stuff, from original paintings for tarot cards to the Eranos Collection of Jungian Archetypes. Anyone not connected with UCL, of which it’s part, has to apply for library membership but once you’re in, it’s free. Recently they’ve loosened the criteria to include “independent researchers” and “commercial researchers” in an effort to open the institute up to outsiders. Details on how to join are here.
Mysterious files in the Warburg library
The Wellcome Library on Euston Road, part of the museum dedicated to health and human experience, has long been the London freelancers’ favourite. But it’s worth noting because it’s free, silent and like the British Library over the road, it’s open to everyone. But unlike the BL, the desk space is endless, which means you can turn up any time of day and are pretty much guaranteed to find a place to work. If you’re not a member you can get a day-visitor pass. Opening hours and directions are here.
The Building Centre on Store Street is an exhibition venue which displays an odd mix of trade-y stuff such as bathroom fittings and conceptual, arty installations on what has become known as the built environment. The centre used to be part of the Architectural Association but is now run by a charity called the Built Environment Trust. I’m never quite sure who it’s for, but it doesn’t really matter: it’s open to everyone, there’s a bit of free co-working space and a bright, quiet cafe with power points.
Crosby & Hope at the Sackler Studios is on Bear Gardens in Bankside, a refuge from the crowds on the South Bank and oddly invisible to tourists. When I worked at the FT, this place was a lot scruffier, the food far stodgier, and journalists used to flee here to get stuff done when the open-plan offices around the corner on Park Street got too much. You can always find a seat, the WiFi is good, the sandwiches are delicious and the only voices you are likely to hear are those of actors from Shakespeare’s Globe theatre learning their lines (the Sackler Studios are the Globe’s rehearsal studios).
The London Library in St James’s Square is an anomaly in this list, because it’s a private library and you have to be a member to enter, which costs £575 a year if you are over 29 (half price if you are between 16 and 29). It’s expensive but if you earn your living this way I think it’s worth it. Besides the library’s vast collection of books and periodicals, which you can borrow and take home for as long as you like, it also has an excellent remote online catalogue, and I use its dedicated writers’ room all the time. This room is serious, studious and so hushed you often find yourself glared at for the faintest rustle or overly clicky keyboard. Typically you have to arrive early to get a desk, but not in summer.
The Old Justice on Bermondsey Wall is my favourite London pub to work in during the week. It’s an independent with an unpretentious, original Arts and Crafts interior, well off the tourist trail and quiet enough to allow a little light concentration. I also like working in the Mayflower at Rotherhithe, with views of the river, and the Pelton Arms in Greenwich.
The Finnish Church, also in Rotherhithe on Albion Street, has a terrace cafe serving thick, gloopy Finnish coffee and OK Wi-Fi. The modernist interiors are lush and restrained, a little Alvar Aalto in south-east London (though it was not designed by Aalto but by the Anglo-Finnish architect Cyril Sjöström Mardall, in 1958). There’s a pre-bookable sauna — “the best in London” — in the basement, too, open to everyone.
Inside the Finnish Church at Rotherhithe
The rest. Lots of freelancer friends work in the British Library, but it’s often easier to get a table at the Clove Club than it is to get a desk there. The bar at BFI Southbank is another place where I see lots of writers, but it’s too hectic and distracting, and the upholstery too squishy and yielding, for me. The fifth-floor Granville-Grossman members’ bar at Tate Modern is drenched in light and has river views, but it’s canteen-like and often rammed for most of the day. The members’ cafe at Tate Britain is far less frenetic.
That’s it. What have I missed?
I loved Arthur Jafa / Mark Leckey / Hardcore / Love, a two-film installation in the temporary Conditions gallery in the Whitgift shopping centre in Croydon (like Westfield, aggressively air conditioned; unlike Westfield, three-quarters deserted).
Jafa’s work, Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), is about violence inflicted on Black Americans; Leckey’s, Fiorucci Made me Hardcore (1999) is about dance culture in 1970s and 1980s Britain. Both films deal with collective cultural memories and the inescapable past. Half the capital seemed to be in Croydon for the opening event. It’s one of the best exhibitions in London.
There’s a good FT story about it here.
Martin Luther King in Croydon: a still from Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death
Things I’m looking forward to:
Kate Bush and the Moving Image, a BFI talk by Stephen Glynn on his recent book about her contribution to the visual arts, on July 28.
Hilary Lloyd: Very High Frequency, a series of multimedia installations at Voltaire Studios on the work of playwright and TV dramatist Dennis Potter, which opens on September 10.
The David Bowie Centre and archive at V&A Storehouse East, which opens on September 13 (a few months after the opening of the Storehouse, which is a wise move — no one wants to be upstaged by Bowie).
Things I’ve been working on:
Read me in the New York Times on Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings, the 18th-century building that claims to be the world’s first skyscraper — recently rescued by Historic England.
Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings: 18th-century proto-Brutalist, perhaps
I also have a piece coming up in the Telegraph Arts Review section on Liverpool’s ambitions to become the Hollywood of the north — a project known as Liverwood. Sam Mendes has already had a look around the derelict site that will (hopefully) become a vast studio complex, a contender for his four Beatles biopics, perhaps. Mendes hired a whole carriage on an Avanti West Coast train to take his crew up — amazing they got there.
As Jimmy Mulville, co-founder of Hat Trick Productions and co-presenter of the excellent Insiders: The TV Podcast, said when I interviewed him for the piece: “When I go to America, as I do all the time, and say I’m from Liverpool their faces light up The Beatles! Football! It has an international reputation.” So why not?
And I’m about to go to Japan for several weeks, brazening out an artist’s prophecy of disaster and fitting in a trip to the World Expo in Osaka. As one architectural writer whispered recently, the British pavilion has all the excitement of a demountable Debenhams.
Other things I’m working on:
A story about what makes urban places successful
A story about David Bowie
A story about lost boutiques
A story about 1980s fashion
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My website, where you can find a selection of my work, is here.