Now a familiar part of modern working life, the collective workspace, whereby small firms share office space and communal facilities, was the brainchild of the architect David Rock, who has died aged 96. He established a pioneering working community at 5 Dryden Street in Covent Garden in 1972, at a time when London’s famous fruit and vegetable market was in decline, and the wider area was resisting ambitions to terraform it into the West End equivalent of the Barbican. Characterful old buildings were available and ripe for conversion and Rock, in his role as an enterprising architect-developer, spotted an opportunity.
At Dryden Street, a collective of more than 30 independent, design-related firms was billeted in a remodelled 19th-century warehouse, with fashionably exposed brick walls and timber roof trusses. Rock recognised that it was often small outfits that exuded the greatest energy, potential and creativity, and that a communal workspace could offer a different kind of socially and economically supportive environment. After Dryden Street came a similar initiative in Chiswick, west London, where a former Sanderson wallpaper factory was converted into the Barley Mow Centre, providing workspaces for craftspeople, designers and architects.
