2. Not embarrassingly empty

Five weeks out. Fifty-one registrations of the 500 Paul needs. The optimism-o-meter hasn't moved all week.

Everyone who tries to build a workplace design event starts by copying Clerkenwell Design Week. In this episode we find out why you can't - from the woman who curates its talks programme - and what you do instead.

Katie Richardson explains that Clerkenwell works because of where it is, not what it is, and explains the closed loop every new event has to crack: brands come if you have visitors, visitors come if you have brands.

Meanwhile, Dave James has spent four years building a version called ClerkenWales in a converted chapel in Cardiff, and Herb Kim, who has run Thinking Digital in the North East for seventeen years, is disarmingly honest about his own first year - where the target isn't a full room... it's a room that isn't embarrassingly empty.

Also: what Work Beyond Walls actually is, why Darren Richardson told Paul that if he didn't use the name he'd take it and do it better himself, a thirty-year-old government publication nobody else spotted, and what would have to be true to get a magazine publisher in Stoke on a train.

Featuring Katie Richardson, Dave James (BLOKKA), Herb Kim (Thinking Digital), Darren Richardson (Gardiner Richardson), Mark Eltringham (Workplace Insight), Will Easton, Terry McStea (RTC / Design Network North) and Paul Glaister.

Work Beyond Walls takes place at the Boiler Shop, Newcastle, on 9 and 10 September 2026. Attendance is free.

Sign up: workbeyondwalls.uk
Follow Work Beyond Walls on LinkedIn for talks and sessions as they're announced.

Work in Motion, series 1: The inside story of Work Beyond Walls, is written and presented by Ian Ellison, and produced by Dave Crackles, for Workpattern.

Subscribe so you get the next episode as soon as it lands - and if you know someone who needs inspiring about how to make work better, please pass it on.

Transcript

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Paul Glaister 0:00

Good afternoon, Mr. Ellison.

Ian Ellison 0:01

How's it going?

Paul Glaister 0:02

Going okay. We've pressed record, haven't we?

Ian Ellison 0:07

I have pressed record. So do you know what today is?

Paul Glaister 0:11

I do know what today is.

Ian Ellison 0:13

Go on then, what's today?

Paul Glaister 0:14

Five weeks.

Ian Ellison 0:15

Five weeks to the day from the doors opening. When I last spoke to Paul Glaister about registrations a week ago, he told me what he'd need by today to stay on target for the 500 sign-ups he's after to hopefully get the attendance he needs. So, come on then. How are we doing?

Paul Glaister 0:39

We we're doing okay, but not where we'd like to be. I know I I did say in our last conversation that um I give myself the target of by the end of this week.

Ian Ellison 0:50

Oh, I see. You're getting out of the technicality.

Paul Glaister 0:52

I need another 50 registrations to get to get above the hundred or another hundred registrations to get it to 150.

Ian Ellison 1:00

Okay, so you've got 50. Okay. 51 or 500 target.

Paul Glaister 1:07

We've gone over 10%.

Ian Ellison 1:14

So I think it'd be fair to say that right now things are heading in the right direction, but not nearly fast enough. So where's the needle on the Optimisticometer this week?

Paul Glaister 1:26

I think we're stuck on 60%. Just like last week. Just like last week.

Ian Ellison 1:44

This is Work in Motion from Work Pattern. Series

Intro

Ian Ellison 1:48

1. The inside story of Work Beyond Walls, exploring why one man thinks the Northeast needs an event like this and whether anyone else agrees. Written and presented by me, Ian Ellison. Episode 2. Not embarrassingly empty. In the first episode, which you should listen to first if you haven't yet, we learnt how an idea for a pop-up furniture showroom in a railway arch turned into a two-day extravaganza at the Boiler Shop, a grade two-star listed building and former locomotive works, once Paul Glaister, co-founder and brand principal of Work pattern, got his hands on it. What we didn't do is establish what the event actually is, which is a bit awkward because in five weeks, as I record this, several hundred people are supposed to walk through the doors in Newcastle to experience something special. And Paul has promised them quite a lot. Not an expo, not a trade show, not a conference. Something that blends elements from each to make something different. Something better. He's promised them the Northeast's first living workplace. And the event has a name. Work Beyond Walls. It didn't have this until recently, and we'll get to that too, because an event without a name can be quite a challenge. Coming up in this episode, what is Work Beyond Walls? Has anyone ever actually pulled something like it off? How important is a name? And to Paul and his team have a hope of getting at

Clerkenwell and the closed loop

Ian Ellison 3:31

least 500 people to even care by the 9th of September. In episode one, you heard the same challenge from three different people. Beth, Philippa, and Paul. If you want to see the good stuff, you have to get on a train. And in the early days of Work Pattern, Paul even went one better.

Paul Glaister 3:51

I managed to get myself a little van and I'd quite regularly drive down to London and come back with I'd steal things from the showroom. He was heading directly for Clerkenwell. Clerkenwell had a sign up and do it one stage, I think, trying to keep me out of it. Because you kept nipping down there and kept nipping down there, and I always came back with something.

Ian Ellison 4:10

Clerkenwell, alongside Farringdon, is a neighbourhood in London, about a square mile in area just north of the Barbican. If you don't work in design, there's no reason you'd know it's the centre of gravity for the entire British design industry, but it is, and there's a reason.

Katie Richardson 4:31

The reason it's there is because there is a multitude of architects, and the history of the area means that architects set up in lofts and warehouses, and from there brands came to the area. So furniture brands, accessory brands, brands related to architecture and design.

Ian Ellison 4:53

That's Katie Richardson.

Katie Richardson 4:55

I am a PR and brand consultant by trade. As part of my remit for Clerkenw ell Design Week, I actually curate the official talks program. I grew up in Essex and I moved to London and I lived in Clerkenwell for many years. That was my stomping ground.

Ian Ellison 5:17

If you talk to pretty much anyone from the workplace design sector in the UK, there's one event that everyone has heard of: Clerkenwell Design Week. Launched in 2010, and after 15 editions, it's become the award-winning de facto benchmark for everything else. And Katie has handled the official talks program, Conversations at Clerkenwell, for the last seven years. Clerkenwell Design Week runs for three days in May. Owned by Media 10, it now attracts well over 30,000 visitors annually to explore more than 600 showroom events and visit 16 curated exhibitions. I asked her to describe it to somebody who's never been.

Katie Richardson 6:18

What the festival has done is open up a lot of public spaces with the support of the council, and brands or entities or designers can come along and take those and create something wonderful. So when you're on the public route travelling around, you've also got installations, pop-ups. So for example, we created a pavilion just off of Clerkenwell Green, and it just became this wonderful hub for people to see colour, be inspired by how the product can look in context. And that is a big part of the festival to happen across these unexpected creative and curated moments.

Ian Ellison 6:59

So it's a business with elements of a festival, and the entire district is the stage. The showrooms are already there because the architects were already there, because the warehouses were already there. Hundreds of years of history creating a gravitational pull towards a unique location. Which brings me to what I actually wanted to ask, because there are so-called Clerkenwells popping up elsewhere now. There's ClerkenWales in Cardiff. There was a ClerkenLeeds this year. And this thing happening in Newcastle in five weeks could have been called Clerken Up North or something like that. Can we do this when we don't have a Clerkenwell? We do have a design community, but we don't have that gravitational pull.

Katie Richardson 7:48

And obviously with Clerkenwell, you have this wonderful landscape of architecture and design already there, and bringing it to life is what the show does. If you airlifted it to a blank canvas, you would have problems because it's to do with buildings, architecture, and all of those things, right?

Ian Ellison 8:08

Right. So the model everyone starts trying to copy is a model that, according to someone involved in running it, can't be copied because the bit that makes it unique isn't the event. It's the sense of place the event rests upon. The Northeast hasn't got that. It's got a passionate, if small, design community with some great university courses feeding it. What it hasn't got though is a defined district you can point at on a map. But then Katie said something else that I thought was really interesting. I told her what Paul's actually doing: the boiler shop, the Stephenson industrial history, 20 odd brands, the ambition, and I asked her the industry-facing question. Not will people come, but what would make a furniture brand say yes to a brand new first-year event when they could just do Clerkenwell?

Katie Richardson 9:03

It's a bit of a closed loop, isn't it? You have to show the brands that you're going to get your visitors. That's the ongoing challenge. You have to show them that if they're going to invest, they're going to reach the right specifiers in the audience. So that is something that builds over time.

Ian Ellison 9:19

A closed reinforcing loop. The brands come if you've got the visitors. The visitors come if you've got the brands, chicken and egg. And you can't have either without the other. Except Paul has 23 partners signed up already. He got every one of them before a single attendee registration. And then in the last week of July, when the event site finally went live, this happened.

Paul Glaister 9:54

Being inundated by other people, can we get involved in this? Is there a space for us? Which is interesting.

Ian Ellison 10:00

So what do you do instead?

Ian Ellison 10:03

So the side of the loop Katie says is the hard side, the half that's supposed to take years, Paul's already cracked, pardon the pun, for a workplace event that has never happened, in a region with no track record of them, or nothing but his word and his reputation. And now more are interested. But the other side, the easy-sounding side, getting people to walk through a free door in their own region, that's the half, sitting at 51 registrations. Hold that thought. Option two is what a small studio in Cardiff did four years ago.

Dave James 11:06

My name's Dave James. I am an interior designer and director at Blocker, an interior design and architectural studio with offices in Cardiff and Sheffield.

Ian Ellison 11:16

Dave's event is ClerkenWales. It happens in a converted chapel called Cornerstone at the bottom of Church Street in Cardiff. 2026 will be its fourth year.

Dave James 11:27

What we try and do is bring a little bit of a feel of what Clerkenwell Design Week brings to designers and sort of bring it home and bring it into a local setting where people can come and experience it for a couple of days. Going to Clerkenwell Design Week was the big highlight for any designer's calendar.

Ian Ellison 11:44

But that highlight can actually come at a cost.

Dave James 11:47

I've had experiences where it was only certain members of the team could go, and then even those members of the team, they'd have to almost report on what they stole when they came back to the prove they were paying attention and not just having ice creams and drinking beer and that sort of thing. This is it, again.

Ian Ellison 12:02

So Dave and his colleagues set about to emulate the experience for their own local design community.

Dave James 12:09

We needed to find a venue that kind of ticked all the boxes for us in what we were looking for. We knew we definitely didn't want a kind of an empty, cold exhibition space. When we sort of found Cornerstone, it's a great backdrop for what we create.

Ian Ellison 12:21

So Cornerstone, I'm guessing, if it's converted chapel, it has got lots of history and lots of character, but it is still ultimately a blank canvas. Not like the NEC is a blank canvas, just an empty hall, but it's it's still a blank canvas.

Dave James 12:37

That's exactly it in a nutshell.

Ian Ellison 12:46

Sound familiar? And what happens inside isn't too far, I think, from what Paul's actually trying to do. Here it is from someone who's done it three times already.

Dave James 12:57

The biggest word that kind of commonly gets used when we're talking about this event is collaboration. They work together to create a setting within that hall that people can use throughout the day. So that could be used to, you know, work with your team. A lot of independent designers come down and kind of co-work for the day from there. Lisa, who I work with, calls it a sticky event. So you come down and you stay there for the day or how much time you can spare and spend as much time in that space to help kind of create that buzz and that atmosphere within there.

Ian Ellison 13:26

Sticky. Remember that word too, because we'll come back to it later. Four years in, ClerkenWales has gone from six or seven manufacturers to 23. There's a reserve list, and crucially, because this is what Paul has to be able to tell his own partners, it works commercially.

Dave James 13:43

And the manufacturers themselves, they'll say, you know, just on the back of those two days, we've had three orders come in, we've had four project inquiries, and they've had actual tangible business awarded to them through attending ClerkenWales, which is why we've kind of got a long list of people who want to attend.

Ian Ellison 14:01

Now, before this starts sounding like a slam dunk, there is also a lot of learning from mistakes. Like, for example, the need to oversell tickets.

Dave James 14:11

The guy called James Munch, who works for 01 furniture, he kind of pointed out to me, he said, Well, you do know if you want 20 people to show up, you need to sell about 40 to 60 tickets. I was like, Oh. And that brought me to sort of crashing back around to earth a little bit.

Ian Ellison 14:26

Ah yes, the curse of Eventbrite and Free Tickets, a painful lesson in the difference between a registration and an actual human showing up. Which Paul is clearly aware of given his own maths. 500 registrations to get around 300 bodies and 200 unique organisations to visit over two days. So ClerkenWales proves it's possible. You don't need Clerkenwell to do something valuable and memorable. You need a place with some character and a reason to stay in it. But there is a catch, and it's the one that challenges Paul specifically. ClerkenWales is an event by designers for designers. Dave's completely open about this.

Dave James 15:10

Coming at it as designers, that's what we do first and foremost. This is who we're putting it on for. It's kind of as designers, what would we want?

Ian Ellison 15:18

And that's only half of what Paul's promised. He wants the design community, yes, but he's also said he wants people who have probably never bought a chair or any other office furniture for that matter in their lives. Local and regional businesses, employers, employees, the public as well as the private sector, people whose bosses might think work beyond walls sounds like a bit of a tangent, maybe even a bit of a jolly. So, taking a specialist conversation and getting a whole region to turn up for it, up here in the Northeast from nothing. There's one person who has done exactly that, and I needed to understand more about it.

Herb Kim 16:05

My name's Herb Kim, and I am the founder of the Thinking Digital Conference, TEDx Manchester, TEDx Newcastle, TEDx Durham, and TEDx Liverpool. I spend my year trying to find interesting emerging talents, people who have been there and done it, and helped them tell their story in a 15-minute nugget.

Ian Ellison 16:27

Thinking Digital runs at the Glasshouse in Gateshead, the building many of us still call the Sage, and this May was its 17th year. When I asked Terry McStea, who you met last time and knows about pretty much every event in this region, which ones are genuinely unmissable? Thinking Digital was the first one out of his mouth.

Terry McStea 16:48

I think the unmissable ones are Thinking Digital, run by Herb Kim. That usually sells out pretty quickly after the tickets go on sale. So that has become genuinely an unmissable part of the annual calendar. I think the Northumbrian Water Innovation Festival is certainly up there as well as being something that people put in their diaries months in advance. If for whatever reason the Innovation Festival was cancelled or thinking digital was cancelled, it would leave a huge hole, and people would be really, really disappointed that it wasn't happening.

Ian Ellison 17:22

Unmissable sellout.

Herb Kim 17:26

So the first one was in May 2008, and um it was it was very challenging, if I'm completely honest with you. The first year uh was probably on the knife edge between disaster and success. Year one was it was badly undersold. I mean, we thought the people were who were coming were amazing and all that sort of stuff, but you know, it wasn't like we already had Taylor Swift. That was super challenging. One of the biggest stresses. I mean, even if your event is free and you have catering and you have, I don't know, whatever, some big name coming, they'll oftentimes still struggle to not even get the place full, but to get the place not embarrassingly empty.

Ian Ellison 18:11

Not embarrassingly empty. Ouch. That's the founder of one of the most respected events in the Northeast talking about his own year one. So when I asked why it's harder up here, because I'd always viewed it as a numbers thing, Herb shared a more nuanced perspective.

Herb Kim 18:29

I feel like, like down in London, because of the density of just the sheer density of people, that you can have some fairly mediocre events in terms of content, but they still get the footfall, they still, you know, so the sponsors are happy because the place is nice and full and all that sort of stuff.

Ian Ellison 18:46

Whereas 250 miles north up here.

Herb Kim 18:49

The content does need to be good in order to give people a reason, whether they're based in the region or coming from outside the region, to make the journey. But then there's the added challenge of building audience. You know, if you speak to people in culture and things like that, audience development is always a huge, a huge challenge.

Ian Ellison 19:08

So it isn't just that there are fewer people, it's that the bar is higher. In London, a mediocre event can fill a room because that room is surrounded by a metropolis. Up north, mediocre equals empty. You have to be better to get the same result, which puts an enormous amount of significance on what you actually put on that stage. And here's where two seasoned event experts disagree. Sort of. Katie at Clerk enwell still targets big names.

Katie Richardson 19:42

The official talks program still remains the one where we will try to get big names, recognizable brands, and content that speaks to the audience and represents the show.

Ian Ellison 19:59

But not quite in the way you'd maybe think.

Katie Richardson 20:02

I don't want to get someone to stand up and say, here is my chair, this is how I made the chair. It's not interesting for the speakers. I would rather hear the backstory of a designer than someone presenting how they created their chair. I always work on the basis of what would I want to stop and listen to, because we are all-time poor. So if you're going to decide to stop and listen for an hour to someone talking, it's going to have to be good, right?

Ian Ellison 20:30

And the trick she's landed on after years of doing it is that if you get the right people, the topics look after themselves.

Katie Richardson 20:37

What I've realized is if you get good people, new and old, established and emerging, what they do is they bring their opinions on all of these things to the table by default. So you don't have to have a talk on sustainability because you know that if you bring in a new designer, they're going to talk to you about how they're weaving that into their work or developing their business.

Ian Ellison 21:03

Whereas Herb's gone the other way, he started out paying for keynotes and then stopped.

Herb Kim 21:09

We knew that to be a sustainable event, we weren't going to be able to afford to pay keynotes big money. We did the first year and maybe in the second year as well, but the feedback we got was kind of like, yeah, they were they were good, but like they didn't like make the event. I'm not coming back next year because I'm expecting an equivalent star to be there, right? The problem about becoming big is that oftentimes you can just live off your name. That does happen. If you can get a big name or big company to come, then great. I I would say make sure though they can actually deliver the goods.

Ian Ellison 21:47

And if that wasn't enough for Paul and his team to unpick, there's also Darren Richardson, who you'll meet properly in a minute, with a third view, which is that the most interesting thing you can do with a stage is put Someone on it that nobody expected.

Darren Richardson 22:05

A friend of mine is called Morag Myerskoff, a graphic designer who's become um an artist and does huge public art around the world. But Morag works with colour and how a colour affects emotions. And you know, she's an amazing individual. And if we had something like that as a speaker, that would kind of challenge

What's in a name?

Darren Richardson 22:24

people's like, why is Morag there? Why is that? Finding the right people who've got interesting perspectives that can elevate it out of a simple expo that has a bit of furniture stuck in a room that takes it to something that has an opinion on the world.

Ian Ellison 22:37

Big names, emerging names, and names that take you by total surprise from outside your world. Three different answers, and honestly, all three are probably right-ish. So, um, over to you, Paul. I can't wait to see how that lineup takes shape. Now, about the event name. In some parallel dimension of the multiverse, there's a version of the last four months where none of this part of the story happened at all, and Paul just got on with it. Because when Paul first contacted Terry McStay about his idea, Terry offered some advice. It doesn't really matter what you call it, the name stops mattering the minute people turn up. Just get on with it. Paul says Terry's advice was simple.

Paul Glaister 23:25

You know, we do we agonize over a lot of these things, and then afterwards it just becomes not irrelevant, but it's not as precious as you first thought it was.

Ian Ellison 23:35

Good advice? Well, we'll never know, because in this dimension, things played out differently.

Darren Richardson 23:40

Darren Richardson, creative director at Gardner Richardson. We're a strategic brand communications agency based in Newcastle.

Ian Ellison 23:49

Darren is originally from Teeside. He got pulled into this by Elliot Brook from deadgood, someone we're hopefully going to hear from later in the series, from an award-winning furniture business founded by Northumbria University graduates, because Elliot thought it mattered that this event represented the region properly. The working title at that point was Design Up North.

Darren Richardson 24:11

And I think that felt like a first step of, you know, that's fine. Whenever we're developing thinking and ideas, but you have certain ideas that you immediately go to, then you throw it away, and then you go to the next level, the next level, the next level. Using the word up north sort of feels like it's poor us kind of thing. It felt a little bit apologetic rather than actually being a little bit more confident.

Ian Ellison 24:28

Apologetic. That's a tough thing to hear about your own idea. So Terry says a name's not that important, but for Darren, a name and the language you use around it really matters. And Paul, who values both of their input, is frozen in between with a venue booked and the clock ticking. Darren's counsel was this.

Darren Richardson 24:50

We always bring it back to a positioning narrative about what the customer needs. You know, feed the food the fish want. Because the name is the first hook that people are going to hear before they see anything they might hear it, or someone talks about it. And we kind of arrived at this idea of work beyond walls because it felt like it was answering that sense of you want this to transcend physical workspaces, embrace technology, embrace society, you know, what's going on in the world and how the world of work is changing. So it needs to have something that's a little bit more thought-provoking. It's an invitation to, you know, push the boundaries a little bit. It also will help entice people to think, well, what's that event about? I'm interested in that. You know, it's the sort of sizzle and the sausage kind of thing. The name becomes the sizzle.

Ian Ellison 25:32

Sell the sizzle, not the sausage. That's the world we live in now, folks. Paul, however, wasn't so sure.

Darren Richardson 25:39

He was a bit nervous about the name, so I ended up ringing him and actually saying that, mate, this is gonna work. Believe me, trust me, this is gonna work. It delivers everything that you want to achieve from this event. You want to kind of get people to go and think, you know, outside the box. You want to challenge people's preconceptions. Therefore, you've got to intrigue them with something that starts that conversation, start that dialogue. So I was fairly forthright on the call, actually. Fairly forthright. Here's how forthright. This is genuinely the right direction. And if you don't do it, mate, I'm gonna go and do it and I'm gonna do it better than you will.

Ian Ellison 26:11

Now I should qualify. That lands a bit harder out of the full interview context. Darren says it's smiling, and it came after 10 minutes of him explaining to me that a huge part of his job is giving people the confidence to make a decision they might be a bit frightened of.

Darren Richardson 26:26

I often say that we don't just sell creativity, we sell confidence to make decisions. And our job is to help people make decisions. We often come into situations where people don't like what we present, and that doesn't make me feel uncomfortable. That's quite reassuring because we've pushed it beyond the realm of what they're used to hearing.

Ian Ellison 26:45

So Paul trusts Darren and buys into the concept. He takes it to his team, and well, it's growing on them, which might be the most honest thing anybody has ever said about a brand launch. Anyway, there's actually a small footnote to the naming socket that nobody seems to have spotted except me. There is a publication from the early 90s written by a seminal workplace firm called DETW for the British government about how work was going to change. It's called Working Beyond Walls. There were two more in the sequence that came after it, Working Without Walls, and years later, The Way We Work. Yes, I am that much of a workplace nerd. So I guess you can take that one two ways. Either somebody should have run a deeper web search, maybe got on the Wayback Machine, or, and this is probably a more useful view, the idea within a name that's over 30 years old still hasn't landed. Even after the post-pandemic hybrid working bun fight. Which is more or less exactly why Paul is putting on this event. There's one thing I keep coming back to about names though, and I got it from Herb. Thinking Digital was originally fronted by a company called CodeWorks, run by Herb at the time. By most conventions, it should have been called something like the Code Works Technology Summit. It wasn't, and there was a reason.

Herb Kim 28:08

People attached to the company at a senior level were quite keen for

Worth the journey?

Herb Kim 28:14

it to not be named after the company. So that should it explode and be this very public failure.

Ian Ellison 28:21

Oh, interesting. Interesting.

Herb Kim 28:23

I would probably go down with the ship, but the ship itself would at least be spared some of the collateral damage.

Ian Ellison 28:32

Which demonstrates that naming a thing isn't entirely a marketing decision. It's also a decision about whether you're prepared to risk putting your own name next to potential public failure. Risk and reward, eh? It can be a very delicate balance, and one that we'll only know in Work Beyond Wall's case after the event. Okay, let's say the name is spot on. Let's say the venue is inspiring, the talks are thought-provoking, and all of Workpattern's partners are consummate hosts. But why would anyone who doesn't live in Newcastle or Gateshead get on the train? Katie had an answer to that and it involved somebody we both knew. Mark was saying, if I'm gonna come across from Stoke, I want something that I'm not gonna get from anywhere else. I want to feel the region, I want to feel like I'm going to the Northeast, to a Northeast event that's gonna give me something that I can't get from Clerkenwell.

Katie Richardson 29:29

That's a great point. It's like speaking to the locality of it. But again, you've got to find a way to reach your audience. You've got to find a way to reach the Mark Eltringhams, haven't you?

Mark Eltringham 29:46

Well, let's meet Mark Eltringham then. Mark Eltringham. I'm the publisher of uh a number of things these days, actually. The most ancient of them all is WorkplaceInsight.net, a blog stroke news website, which has been around since 2012. We also now publish a magazine, a print magazine, if you please, called Works, and been in the industry for 30 odd years talking about workplace design and management, more or less.

Ian Ellison 30:11

Now Mark gets asked to support new things constantly. I've asked him myself more than once about some things that never even came to fruition. So I put it to him straight. What would need to be true for you to get on a train, cross the Pennines, and support work beyond walls?

Mark Eltringham 30:26

Well, I think it would be something that's related to the uniqueness of the region. You know, I I saw another conference program that you know covered issues that I I think I've seen before. When you look at all these these regions, you know, they all have their own challenges and their own opportunities. And I think that would be what would get me up there.

Ian Ellison 30:44

And there are regional differences. Paul's already got data that demonstrates this, which he'll be building on in real time at the event. And nobody ever writes about them because the big city, big brand, knowledge worker writ large narrative casts a shadow across everything else.

Mark Eltringham 31:01

That whole thing about make the office worth a commute. I don't know what it's like travelling on the metro in in the Northeast. But I know I've got a 20 or 30 minute walk into work every day. So my commute is okay. When people are making that statement, what they mean is the commute into London Bridge or Waterloo or whatever, which is often a miserable experience, isn't it? And a lot of these statements are like that. And it's not just London-centric, it's uh it's kind of like an elite statement.

Ian Ellison 31:28

So there it is. Give Mark something he can only get in the North East and he'll come. But give him another panel on hybrid working and return to office mandates, and he'll stay over in Stoke. Thank you very much. Which gets us to what Paul has actually promised.

Paul Glaister 31:47

Work Beyond Walls is two days in an industrial building behind the station in Newcastle, where the whole space will be transformed into a workspace experience brought together by over 20 global brands, and the workplace side of the discussion will be through curator talks, seminars, and workshops as well, that we'll be doing to essentially bring and unite, I suppose, the design community, the business community, academia into one space to understand this subject better and work out what this is going to look like in the future.

Ian Ellison 32:30

And the crucial bit, the bit that makes it different from a showroom, a trade show, or an expo is that for work beyond walls, the boiler shop is going to become a living workplace.

Paul Glaister 32:44

We want it to be sticky. We need people to come in and get engaged with everything about it, the whole spirit of it, to share what their issues are, the challenges that they're facing. No one's going to be selling to these people. Where they will really get benefit from is the the various speakers that will be there that are to, you know, obviously sharing their insight, knowledge, research. But if they want to just use that space to work in for the two days to make productive use of their time whilst they're there, then so be it. That's great, that's what it's there for.

Ian Ellison 33:19

Paul says sticky. David James, down in Cardiff, say sticky too. And Katie Richardson, talking about Clark and Well, said something pretty, well, sticky as well.

Katie Richardson 33:31

I work for myself, I work on my laptop. If I'm going out for the day, I need to know that I can sit down, use my Wi-Fi, do some work. That's really important. The show has to think about things like that. You've got to attract people and have them there. Most people are professional and they're busy. Going back to Clark and Well again, I worked with Balks on an installation in Old Sessions House, and we created a lounge which showed the acoustics, and it was a stunning physical space. But within that, we created Wi-Fi, we had a DJ, we had a bar because we wanted the people to come and look at it, but we wanted them to sit and stay and work. And I think that's a really key component of any show, of any event is getting people there and keeping them there.

Ian Ellison 34:21

Three people, three cities, the same answer. Sticky matters. Now, we're almost there for episode two, but I need to bring in one more person for a moment.

Will Easton 34:32

I'm Will Easton. I'm currently head of Property and Workplace, and I've got 20 years experience in the built environment.

Ian Ellison 34:41

I've known Will for years. He's opinionated, spiky, witty, very northern, and a bit like me, positively dissatisfied with the status quo of workplace design and management, and the lack of substance beneath so much of our sector's rhetoric.

Will Easton 34:58

When I was in college, uh I always followed creative pursuits, and when you get into the world of work, that gets beaten out of you. What frustrates me is the lack of pace that we can often work at, the lack of vision and the unnecessary governance we put in place to do simple things.

Ian Ellison 35:21

You get the idea. I love talking to Will. He was literally the first to commit. That single sign-up at the start of episode one, that was Will. Because he wants to be part of anything that has any chance of making a difference.

Will Easton 35:37

I've been sat here for the past 12 months thinking, when can I get something quite exciting where I don't have to go and pay an arm and a leg for a train ticket in a hotel in London?

Ian Ellison 35:48

So I thought that as the event and the work beyond War's brand started shaping up, I'd kind of use Will as a proxy for the rest of the audience that Paul needs and see what he thinks. I called him to test some of the new event blurb out on him. Hot off the press. Okay. The North East's first living workplace event. For two days, the boiler shop becomes a fully working workplace, settings you actually work in, workshops that challenge how you think, talks that change what you ask for, and a live survey reading the room in real time.

Will Easton 36:23

That's exciting. Now, first part just repeat the

Ian Ellison 36:29

The North East, the first living workplace event.

Will Easton 36:33

There we go. The living workplace event, and that's the bit that got me. I mean, North East is great because then that puts a pin in the map. But when it's saying the first living workplace event, that's really interesting.

Ian Ellison 36:46

I pushed him to bring that to life for me in his mind's eye.

Outro

Will Easton 36:49

This might sound like a bit of a weird answer, but if I walk in to the venue on September the 9th, bright-eyed and bushy tails, and it feels like I am going into an immersive exhibition at a gallery or a museum, then within seconds I'll know it's worked.

Ian Ellison 37:13

Okay, and flip that around. If you walk in and you see what will have made it fail.

Will Easton 37:19

If I see a name badge on somebody's branded polo shirt, um, or the first question that comes out of somebody's mouth is, where do you work and what do you do? Then it might feel a bit like a traditional expo. So that is the tightrope that Paul Glaister needs to walk.

Ian Ellison 37:41

Yeah. So there you go. Thank you, Mr. Easton. So creating the event is only half the job. And perhaps it's even the easy half. Any advice for Paul Herb?

Herb Kim 37:56

Don't underestimate the challenge of building a community and audience. Because it's the first event, and it's always challenging to, you know, ensure that there's there's healthy engagement. That's ultimately the thing that I see most often people like underestimating.

Terry McStea 38:14

And what about you, Terry? To not stop promoting it right until the day before. Don't let up. Almost pester people and nag people and make sure they come. If they said they're gonna come, it's making it look so incredible that they'd be crazy to miss out. And I think it has the potential to be at that level. I think it does have the potential to be unmissable.

Ian Ellison 38:42

Which is, of course, Katie's bread and butter.

Katie Richardson 38:45

And that is that's a multi-layered process of PR marketing, word of mouth, amplifying your visitors and getting their PR machines to work for you. There's a whole heap of things that you can and should be doing.

Ian Ellison 39:00

I also asked Katie what she'd tell Paul if she were advising him. She'd never heard of Work Beyond Wars until we talked. This is what she said.

Katie Richardson 39:09

Work is an amazing story that is still evolving for the workers, for the designers, for spaces, for products. That would be my core for everything, for the talks, for themes, because everything's in flux. The way that we work is in flux, it's changing, and design is changing around it. Design is shaping that and responding to it, and that is so interesting for me, and potentially for your brands as well. So I would bear that in mind because it's an evolving landscape, and maybe that is the core of what you're trying to communicate.

Ian Ellison 39:48

So I think Paul's got the right idea, but if this event is going to be not embarrassingly empty, he's got a long way to go, and one thing's for sure, it is going to take relentless promotion. You have been listening to the inside story of Work Beyond Walls, written and presented by me, Ian Ellison, and produced by Dave Crackles. Thanks to everyone who's been part of this project. Episode 3 will be out in September. Subscribe to the show so you get it as soon as it drops. To join us on September the 9th and 10th up in Newcastle, head to workbeyondwalls.uk to sign up. That's workbeyondwalls.uk. You'll also find Work Beyond Walls on LinkedIn, where you can learn about talks and sessions as they're announced and get involved as the plans unfold. And please share all of this with anyone you think needs inspiring about how to make work better. Paul and the Work Pattern team would love to see you there.