Conference calls among the cattle

The commute and the office has changed forever. Deborah Nicholls-Lee speaks to those turning the countryside into a different type of workplace

- Deborah Nicholls-Lee & James Fisher

WHEN Caroline Reeves, a farm secretary in the North Wessex Downs, went freelance, she faced a problem. ‘I couldn’t work with young children running around, we had poor broadband and it wasn’t a house I could take clients back to,’ she says. ‘I’ve always lived rurally and for any co-working spaces, you had to go to a big town. I didn’t work in towns, I was a country girl. That’s what I knew and that’s what I wanted to create for others.’

Today, Miss Reeves’s company, the Rural Business Hub, provides two co-working spaces in Hampshire: The Old Post Office, near Andover, and Gander Down Barns on a working farm east of Winchester. Around the UK, 30–40% of us now work remotely at least once a week, a trend bolstered by the pandemic. Working-from-home rates in the countryside are significantly higher than in urban areas and stylish co-working spaces in repurposed rural buildings are breathing new life into the countryside.

Entrepreneurs appreciate these spaces because they can contract or expand their business easily, Miss Reeves points out, and parents like being closer to their children’s school. ‘There’s a lot of ad-hoc use during the summer holidays,’ she’s noticed, as well as customers who have moved house and don’t have broadband yet.