IT’S funny looking back to what people thought about employees working from home before the Covid chaos.

The doubters called it “shirking from home”, but it now seems an accepted part of many people’s working life.

In fact, a new report from the think tank Centre for Cities says that on average central London office workers now only spend 2.3 days a week in their workplace.

People have benefited from less stress caused by commuting and have a more balanced routine.

This all naturally threatens to change the character of the city, with the idea of big companies needing to cluster together and call themselves a “quarter” at risk of becoming obsolete.

Westminster City Council was fast onto the idea long before Covid, having considered that staff remote working could free up office space which it might then be able to let out and bring in some extra funds.

Harrington recalls a discussion at the Conservative Party conference a few years before the lockdown and the late Philippa Roe explaining how the council which she was then leading had trialled the idea.

“Our results have been largely good,” she told a rather suspicious crowd at an event organised by the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

She did, however, say she wondered if everybody was really doing a full shift at home on slower Fridays, adding: “It does take a certain sort of office worker who is quite self-motivated to do this.”

Our newsroom could not survive in the way it does if everybody worked from home. The fuel bill would be cheaper but interaction with colleagues sees unexpected ideas shared and problems solved. There are days when you are more productive at home but team members need to see each other.

Maybe it’s different in less chatty industries, but let’s not play down the importance of human contact.

London is a lonely city for many and a workplace can be about a lot more than just work.