Exploring Town

For years, freelancing meant exploring around town and looking for the correct studio doorbell to press.

Old townhouses and shop fronts down an narrow London side street.

Ten years of studio-hopping built up an internal, patchwork map of London. How to cut through Soho without getting lost, that really good coffee round the corner from Farringdon, and the hidden green spaces with a patch of sun for your lunch break.

I don’t work that way any more, and I do miss it sometimes, but I have different priorities now. I juggle two jobs and one of them is unpaid. I’ve been the stay-at-home dad for my three children since they were learning to walk.

Proofs and sign-off still get handled just as accurately at a distance. I have the tools here to check the work in just the same way as I did when I visited that fourth floor townhouse office with the view across the rooftops.

This also means that a studio in Manchester or Glasgow is as easy to support as one in Shoreditch. The internal map has stopped growing. The client list hasn’t.

Does it actually matter where I’m sitting, as long as the work lands on time?