Will Covid kill off the office?

The most useless technology is the one you invent but fail to exploit. The Incas invented the wheel, but seem only to have used it on toys. Hero of Alexandria designed the first steam engine in the 1st century ad, but it was seen as a gimmick. The technological opportunity to escape from city-centre offices has been stuck in a similar limbo between invention and implementation.

In the 1970s, Nasa engineer Jack Nilles envisaged ‘teleworking’ from local work centres. In 1984, the Times reported that tele-commuting was the ‘magical buzzword’ on the US microcomputing scene. In the 1990s, the UK had 200 ‘telecottages’: rural workspaces with computers, communications and social support. More recently, there has been a proliferation of latte-sipping freelancers hunched over MacBooks at coffee shops and WeWorks.

Despite all the fanfare and substantially better technologies, little has changed in recent decades. Last year, just 5.1 per cent of adults in employment worked primarily from home in the UK, according to the ONS.