New year, new address

Forest has a new address:

The Quad, Cambridge
No.9 Journey Campus
Castle Park
Cambridge CB3 0AX

The location (a four-storey business centre ten minutes' walk from the city centre) is the same as before and the building hasn't changed. There is however going to be a new canopy over the main entrance, and a reception area where people can meet and have coffee, although there seems to be an issue with the installation of a coffee machine that still requires approval (!).

I suggested a similar space some years ago because, in the many years Forest has been based here, there has never been a proper communal area, unlike the Barley Mow Workspace in Chiswick where I worked as a freelance journalist in the late Eighties.

I moved in to what is now called the Barley Mow Centre in February 1987 and worked there for four years. I loved it, and met some great people – including graphic designers, IT experts, and translators – often over lunch in the excellent canteen that was run as a stand alone business.

Anyway, the rebranding of what was previously Sheraton House in Castle Park, Cambridge, is a good excuse to list some of the other addresses Forest has had over the years. I'll start with:

2 Grosvenor Gardens, London SW1
When I joined Forest in January 1999 we were in Palace Street, near Victoria Station and a stone's throw from Buckingham Palace. Before Palace Street, Forest had been at 2 Grosvenor Gardens, a Grade II listed building that was only a minute from Victoria Station. Someone who worked there as a temp described the Forest office as "very small and quite tatty" but that's not how the building looks today so it must have been restored since then.

Audley House, 13 Palace Street, London SW1
The move to Audley House, an 'elegant Edwardian building' opposite what is now The Other Palace Theatre, took place in 1998. Marjorie, my predecessor, arranged for the new office to be ‘opened’ by the president of the GMB union. Comedian Jo Brand was another visitor that year. Named ‘Smokers' Rights Champion of the Year’, she apparently popped in to collect her award in person. A former psychiatric nurse, Brand later quit smoking, although I’ve read interviews in which she said how much she enjoyed it - a familiar tale.

Built in 1903, both the building and our office on the ground floor were in pretty good nick so I’m guessing it had been refurbished before Forest moved in. Marjorie went a step further however and had several air filtration units installed in the ceiling that seemed to remove most if not all the tobacco smoke in the room. In those pre-smoking ban days there were four full-time and two part-time staff working for Forest, half of whom were smokers, and the effectiveness of the technology was genuinely impressive.

Unfortunately I also inherited a financially crippling ten-year lease and when the rent went up to £50,000 a year we simply couldn't afford to stay there any longer. In 2004, six years into the lease, we were forced to negotiate our way out, but it cost us an additional £40k in 'reparations'.

Sheraton House, Castle Park, Cambridge
After Audley House we moved our main office out of London to Cambridge and I vowed to never again lease an office. Instead we rented a serviced office (on an annual contract) a short walk from the city centre, and Sheraton House has been our principal address ever since. For several years though we kept a London base, a sort of hot-desking arrangement with a TV production company in central London that was initially based in Margaret Street, near Oxford Circus, but later moved to Wardour Street in Soho.

33 Margaret Street was a great location. Broadcasting House, where I did a lot of interviews for BBC Radio, was just around the corner, and the PR company that worked with us on our campaign against the smoking ban was also a very short walk away. The office we shared with the TV production company was a former penthouse flat on the top floor of a building that was later demolished and replaced by a new office block (pictured here).

After we were given notice that the ‘old’ Seventies building was to be knocked down, we moved to Wardour Street which was a ten minute walk from Margaret Street. It was also in Soho, which gave it added credibility.

Gradually, though, I spent less time in London so when the production company moved again, this time to Marylebone, I declined the offer to go with them. Instead, I started travelling to London only when necessary – for meetings and interviews, for example.

As it happens, the BBC was happy enough for us to do interviews from their Cambridge studio, and I discovered that ITV Anglia also had a small facility in Great Shelford, just outside the city, so we were able to use that as well.

Since Covid, of course, it has become the norm to do interviews via Zoom or some other digital platform so there's far less call to travel to studios in London or anywhere else.

In some ways I miss the formality and occasional excitement of the studio interview, but it's certainly cut down the many hours I used to spend travelling to and from studios in London and elsewhere, not to mention the inevitable waiting around, sometimes for no more than 20 seconds of air time on a national news bulletin.

But I digress.

We moved to Cambridge in February 2004, renting an office from Citibase who have offices in London and around the country.

A great many Citibase Cambridge staff have come and gone since then - too many to name them all - but I would like to give a shout out to long-serving business manager Ann, her equally long-serving assistant Georgie, not to mention Freya, Ellie, and Kristina, plus Sue and Nicky on reception.

All are long gone from Sheraton House but their help and good humour won’t be forgotten.

More recently I am indebted to Chiara without whom I would have struggled to complete the current, and somewhat Byzantine, contract process, but we’re still here and next month will mark the 20th (yes, 20th) anniversary of our move to Cambridge.