Beyond the desk: what office quarters should be offering their day-workers

The most innovative organisations leading the UK’s workplace often strive to deliver everything an employee could possibly need under one roof, from enviable spaces to eat and drink and access to outside workspaces, to sleep pods, yoga rooms and gyms, but humans need a wider radius of human interaction than their co-workers – they want to feel embedded in their location as a whole.

Physical activity is appreciated as part of the working week for its well-understood benefits, but I think we are missing a trick. If approached slightly differently, it’s a fantastic way to bring together existing communities and businesses, levelling the playing field for interaction and providing opportunities for honest and fulfilling engagement outside a ‘CSR’ scope.

Canada Water Dockside is our 4.5-acre site in Canada Water. Uniquely, it is surrounded by more than 130 acres of green and blue space and has easy access to 40 established sports clubs, groups and amenities, making it probably the only place in London able to offer this. This presents us with an exciting and rare opportunity to consider new ways of encouraging integration between commercial entities and the communities they’re making home.

We want to grow the network of sports infrastructure already in place, as supporting grassroots sports and activities helps overcome many physical, social, economic or educational challenges faced by members of a community. It can also counteract challenges in communities by providing opportunities for growth. For occupiers, having easy access to great facilities that encourage employees to engage in physical activity promotes increased job satisfaction and makes the trip into the office that bit more meaningful.

We’ve been speaking to the communities in and around Canada Water Dockside for the last three years, and the plans that were approved in March last year have evolved in response to their detailed feedback. But we knew we needed to go further to achieve our aim of setting up an environment for us to pass the baton to eventual occupiers.

In parallel to working up our designs for the circa 1.5m sq ft of workspace for up to 10,000 people, we actively sought out a partnership with London Sport. The charity, which is supported by Sport England and the Mayor of London, collaborates with local authorities and other organisations to provide better access to sport and physical activity across the capital.

We’re working together on mapping current riches and gaps and are conducting detailed research into the current provision of sport and leisure in the area through the creation of a ‘borough profile’ to better understand the demographics and attitudes of current residents. We also want to understand the impact of strategic funding support and create a plan to deliver it, so we can move from rhetoric around ‘health and wellbeing’ to tangible action.

We’d like to think the work happening in Canada Water Dockside with London Sport will act as a blueprint for how others can design and create active environments across London that promote shared physical activity and establish stronger and deeper relationships between business and local people.