101 Uses for a Dead Office
There’s a design podcast I sometimes listen to called 99% Invisible.
A recent episode called Office Space looks at the challenge of repurposing useless, ugly, obsolete, recently-deceased office buildings.
There’s a housing crisis in every major city and a surplus of offices. It’s almost as if our priorities have been completely backwards for decades.
The solution should be to turn these offices — now largely empty after the pandemic — into homes. Two problems solved, right?
Well, I knew it wouldn’t be that simple because, according to all the design and urban planning videos I watch, zoning laws and corrupt car-prioritsing by-laws cause all manner of problems when you try to turn one urban development into another. And, because I live in Glasgow, I was also aware of the more inherent problem of building homes without proper neighbourhoods to support them.
Neighbourhoods evolve organically. Shops and homes and post offices and third spaces pop up like wildflowers once the initial seeds are sewn. It’s wild, human nature. When you dump a huge housing development in the middle of nowhere (as they did with Glasgow in the 1960s), the neighbourhood doesn’t evolve naturally and they aren’t pleasant places to live. Through boredom and isolation, they become crime hotspots and public health crises.
Office blocks aren’t generally in neighbourhoods. My old office on Concrete Island was a particularly bad example, stranded in a wasteland behind a snakes’ nest of motorways and A-Roads. But even better offices are in pretty shit areas. Go for a walk in one on the weekend (or on Christmas Day, like I did) and you could hear a pin drop. It isn’t fit for humans [now].
Still, it’s better to reuse a building if possible than to demolish and start over. So that’s what some developers are trying to do, according to this podcast. I enjoyed hearing about the various problems and solutions. I want them to work.
Anyway, an interesting nugget is that older office buildings, pre-War, convert relatively well into homes because they have windows.
Did you hear that? Offices used to have windows! And not sarcastic full-wall one-way-mirror windows. Or indeed Microsoft Windows. Just the usual sort of human-scale windows that might make people feel comfortable and at-home.
It’s apparently the post-War builds of the 1950s onwards that present the biggest challenge. The reason? Wait for it.
Air conditioning and fluorescent lights.
Air conditioning and fluorescent lights replaced windows. Oh brave new world.
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Escape the office forever and don’t look back. Buy the brand new edition of our mag.
Issue 16: Available Now
It’s here!
Stock of Issue 16 has arrived at Escape Towers. We’ve already begun to ship them out.
Subscriber copies will be plopping onto UK doormats imminently. International copies will take a little longer but are already shipping.
The digital edition is available for instant purchase and download.
And, as previously reported, there’s a little launch event in Glasgow on Tuesday 25th June.
About Issue 16:
The new issue is subtitled Footloose and Fancy-Free. It looks at mobility, travel, movement, being fleet of foot. Important Escapological concepts, I’m sure you’ll agree.
It features an interview with eccentric art pop legend Momus (pictured below) who seems to live wherever he likes (Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, Osaka, Edinburgh, Montreal, London, New York, Athens) without concern for those practicalities that trouble regular mortals. Our other interview (we like to do two) is with journalist Lydia Swinscoe who lives semi-nomadically, moving from home to home and city to city quite spontaneously. When we spoke she was in Sri Lanka and her next stop… who knows?
There’s Escapological writings on travel and internationalism, loads of stuff from me, and columns from McKinley Valentine, Tom Hodgkinson, Apala Chowdhury, David Cain and more. Tom’s column is a particularly good one, telling the story of his walking club with his old schoolfriends, which I’m not sure he’s written about anywhere before.
There are Escapological film reviews for the first time, a particularly amusing Workplace Woe, a great letter from a financially irresponsible Escapologist, deep reviews of new and old books (including Jenny Odell’s incredible How to do Nothing), musings on the Old [pre-social media] Web, and our unusual “review of a walk,” this time by Canada’s Tom Gibbs from his honeymoon in Lisbon. That cover image is from Lisbon too, actually, but those are my feet and boots, not Gibbs’.
Anyway, it’s a very strong issue and here’s where to bag your treasure.
We Are the 85%!
Remember the “we are the 99%!” mantra of the Occupy movement? Maybe we should borrow (okay, scav) this.
85% hate our jobs according to a 2022 Gallup poll. This is an increase on the 80% I reported in my book, Escape Everything!, in 2016.
At the time, many people found my figure ridiculous. It wasn’t. It was found in research. And now similar research suggests the figure has increased.
Another way of putting it is that only 15% of people actually like their jobs. These will be people working (and doing well enough to survive or already independently wealthy) in the arts, people who make a genuine difference in direct social services, evil people at the top of the tree who do whatever the like, and (I would say) idiots in denial.
Anyway, I don’t have a job (so I’m in the 5% or something) but Escapologists who still work against their will could start saying:
“WE ARE THE 85%”
Put it on your protest signs. Wear it on a badge. Print it on the coffee cup you drink from in the office.
When people ask what it means, tell them.
Tell them about our magazine is you like. But mainly tell them what it means to be in the 85%. That you go to work not because you love it but because you have to.
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Take the Wednesday Off
Stock of Issue 16 will arrive at Escape Towers tomorrow. I’ll ship the subscriber and pre-ordered copies immediately. The envelopes are already printed.
And you know what? Let’s party.
If you’re in the Glasgow area (or can get there easily and responsibly), we’ll meet at the new Third Eye bar at the CCA on Sauchiehall Street.
Tuesday 25th June from 7pm. Yes, that’s a work night. Why not take the Wednesday off? And then never go back?
We haven’t booked the room or anything so grand. We’ll just get a biggish table in the back section (surrounded by the new murals) and let merriment commence. I can’t imagine more than ten people will turn up, so this will be nice and cosy.
The CCA is the perfect place for this get-together. It’s where we first launched New Escapologist in 2008 (it was actually the second issue) and it’s a proper hub of the local art scene. The new bar is run by the venue (rather than a private tenant) so any money spent on beer or snacks goes directly into supporting said art scene. I approve of this.
If you bought a copy of Issue 16 in advance, let me know and you could collect it in person. If you’re yet to buy a copy and would like to buy a copy, bring a tenner in cash.
I’ll have some copies of I’m Out and The Good Life for Wage Slaves with me too. Also a tenner or free if I’m drunk.
Informal. Easy. A hang.
Come along. All welcome.
Parakeets!
I like parakeets. Perhaps its because green is my favourite colour. Or because they look a little bit exotic here in Scotland. Or perhaps it’s because they’re Escapologists.
I assumed their being so far north was a symptom of climate change. They look like hot weather birds after all. But apparently the Himalayas is their natural habitat and they’ve been in the UK since at least the 1970s.
A naturalist writes:
Over the years, I’ve heard many myths about how they got here in the first place. “They were released by a stoned Jimi Hendrix, who let them out in London’s Carnaby Street…”; “They escaped from the film set of The African Queen…”; “They made a bid for freedom when their cage broke during the Great Storm of 1987…”
And the truth?
the parakeets’ presence here is rather a letdown: as popular cagebirds, it was inevitable some would escape.
That’s not a letdown at all! Either way, they’re Escapologists. Godspeed, parakeets.
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The Narcotic Tingle of Possibility
Here’s Rolf Potts (author of Vagabonding) on escape planning:
The question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.
The June issue of New Escapologist is at the printers. Order your copy today.
Fickle
I’ve been re-reading Vagabonding by Rolf Potts for no particular reason. Just as I remember, it’s full of curious wisdom.
He quotes a mid-century naturalist called Edwin Way Teale:
Freedom … seems more rare, more difficult to attain, more remote with each new generation.
then Potts comments that
Teale’s lament for the deterioration of personal freedom was just as hollow a generalization in 1956 as it is now. As John Muir was well aware, vagabonding has never been regulated by the fickle public definition of lifestyle. Rather, it has always been a private choice within a society that is constantly urging us to do otherwise.
Reluctant as I am to completely divorce the individual from society in my writing, I rarely say anything as untempered or full-frontal as that.
Potts is right. It’s elementary Escapology and it must not be forgotten. The world might demand that we go to work, own or rent some bricks and mortar, perform certain duties, behave certain ways. But we don’t have to do any of it. We can’t be controlled to that extent. You can still, after everything, walk away.
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The June of New Escapologist is available to pre-order at our online shop.
So You Want to Be a Nomad
So you want to be a nomad. Or maybe you’re already a nomad but interested in trying out a different transient lifestyle. There are lots of different ways to live a nomad life these days, from workcamping to sailing, but if you’re trying to decide how you want to travel full-time, it can be hard to decide which style will suit you best.
Two of the most popular full-time travel styles for Americans are international backpacking (traveling from country to country, staying in short-term accommodations or rentals à la digital nomads) or RVing (in a wide variety of vehicles) across North America.
From my own personal experiences of backpacking over many years and full-time RVing in the U.S for over two years, both offer unique experiences and cater to different preferences. Let’s break it down: the perks and quirks of each option!
This is from a lovely website called The Dirtbag Dao by Heather Delaney. As a city slicker, I don’t write much about backpacking or RVing but no view of Escapology would be remotely complete without them. They’re both highly valid and and worthwhile means of seeing the world, of living cheaply, of living free.
I remember wistful feelings when a couple of American backpackers, hand-in-hand and generally looking like something from an idealistic travel agency poster, appeared from the exit of a railway station while I was on my morning walk to work. Their energy was so different to mine: they were strolling and marvelling while I was literally trudging. Their movements were free and unfettered while I was being pulled along, under duress, by an invisible tether. I didn’t need to learn the lesson because I already knew what freedom felt like but, man, I wished I was doing what they were doing.
We’ll publish more about backpacking and RVing in future issues of the mag but, in the meantime, you could do worse than read this article and enjoy poke around the Dirtbag Dao site.
Heather also has a list of books and websites for more information, including Rolf Potts’ excellent book about long-term travel, Vagabonding.
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New Escapologist Issue 16 can be ordered today for shipping in June at our online shop.
The Escapes of John Dowie
In February I read The Freewheeling John Dowie, the wise and funny memoir of a comedian who ditched the conventional notions of career success, sold his home and all of his stuff, and took to the open road with a bicycle. I found the book utterly compelling and suspected I’d found my “book of the year” rather early.
He writes in the first chapter about his early brushes with employment. He mopped floors and answered phones but the funniest bit is when he works in a branch of W H Smith (which, coincidentally, I also did, albeit in 1999 rather than 1966):
“When you work for W H Smith,” the twenty-year-old in charge of the paperback department told me proudly, “you’ve got a job for life.”
Apart from the chilling horror such a statement generates…
He lasts nine months at Smiths before seeing a Spike Milligan play at the Grand Theatre in Wolverhampton and deciding to become a comedian. As you know, I love to hear about these epiphany moments. Most people just drift between life chapters and never really “decide” anything, which is what makes these moments so special.
So he concocts a simple escape plan: work and save until you have enough money to put on a comedy show at the Edinburgh Fringe. And then he does it:
After three months of two jobs and very little sleep I managed to raise the money I needed – about £500. I took myself to Edinburgh, performed every day for three weeks, returned to Birmingham with a vastly improved act, got myself an Arts Council Grant and, I’m happy to tell you, haven’t done a day’s work since.
When comedy itself came to feel like a job, Dowie looked for other freedoms. He sold everything. His friend Stewart Lee writes:
Each time I [visited him,] Dowie had less stuff. In the end he had reduced his possessions to five basic food groups; records by Bob Dylan and Moondog; books by William Blake and [Philip K.] Dick; and some Batman comics. It was as if he was preparing to depart. And pretty soon he did. No-one in our gang knew where he’d gone, but we knew he could now carry everything he ever wanted in a backpack, and he’d bought a bike.
And in Freewheeling Dowie writes of his minimalism:
At first I thought that getting rid of the vinyl I’d been collecting since the Sixties would be a wrench. But, with each cardboard box that [the record dealer] packed, carted off and placed in his car, I felt a lightening of the spirit. It lightened even more when he paid me. Several hundred quid. I was astonished. I’d been hoping for a tenner.
Speaking of money, it cost a pretty penny for me to get a copy of Freewheeling, even though it was only published in 2018. Luckily, my copy was badly damaged in the post and I was able to get a refund, reading it in the end for free. Take that, Music Magpie!
Anyway, I got in touch with Dowie about how much I loved his book. I couldn’t help myself. When he explained that the rights had reverted to him since the book went out of print, I pulled some strings and levers to get it re-published, albeit only as an e-book for now. You can buy it here and I recommend that you do.
