To see just how radically the concept of the modern office has been revised in recent years, let us take a trip to Cornwall. The annual school holiday migration may be fully under way but I’m afraid that this is purely a business trip. We take the hour-long flight to Newquay, then we link up with a photographer and drive into the West. When we can’t go any farther we are in St Just. A few miles north of Land’s End, this is Britain’s most westerly town, a pleasant place, with traditional cottages, grubby social housing and several pubs around a square bustling with visitors buying pasties. Just off the square is a solid granite building, housing a number of micro businesses.
On the first floor, above the Flying Squirrels knitting shop, in cramped rooms men are hunched over computers. A guy in shorts, sandals and a tatty surfing T-shirt greets us. He is Morgan Francis, director of Spider Eye, a digital animation company. His partner and the company’s producer, Erica Darby, will join us in a minute. “She’s been on the phone to the lawyer in New York for two hours,” says Francis. Disney is buying a three-year option and is funding a pilot of a children’s series devised by Spider Eye. If the project gets the green light, this little outfit will have a multi-million dollar deal. Until four years ago, Darby and Francis, both of whom have more than 20 years experience in animation, were based in London — just one little company in a busy mediapolis. Now they are in the forefront of a new creative scene, as far from the capital as you can get without falling into the sea.
Cornwall, until recently regarded as a great holiday or retirement destination but blighted by poverty, is now less easily pigeon-holed. There is an economic renaissance that promises to revive the fortunes of the county in a way that hasn’t been seen since the 19th-century tin-mining heyday. Technology and European seed money, that came as a result of the poverty, are producing entrepreneurs. The boom is in the creative industries, growing at more than twice the national average of 6 per cent a year. Cornwall has long been a home for artists; today, the colonists are designers, IT innovators, TV and film producers and writers.
In 2000, Cornwall was given Objective One status, a recognition by the EU that it was among the continent’s poorest regions. It was allocated £350 million from EU structural fund, which needs to be matched by UK money. This was directed towards long-term investment, including grants to enterprises and to bring together further education colleges under the umbrella of the Combined Universities in Cornwall.
But arguably the most far-sighted Objective One initiative was expanding and promoting broadband internet access. Now there is 99 per cent coverage, even in remote communities in the Isles of Scilly and more than 50 per cent of Cornish businesses now have broadband, the same as in Britain as a whole. “The turning point was when they put broadband in. Without it we would really have struggled,” says Darby. The couple used to live in Rickmansworth and were commuting an hour and a half each way. Every three or four months they would make the trip to see a colleague in Cornwall: “We were thinking: why does he get to be here and we are there?”
When they moved, there was no broadband coverage and they worried that they would be unable to make a go of their business. “We were doing everything by courier and sometimes they wouldn’t even come here. The companies allowed an extra day to go beyond Penzance,” recalls Francis. Now, their diverse projects, which include the children’s book Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs, can be seen by clients all over the world with just a few mouse clicks.
Mike Cunliffe, a former editor of C4’s Big Breakfast who last year set up Seven Stones Media, a TV production company near Liskeard, says that it is astonishing how quickly technology has changed the way people work. The company, which has produced series including Return to Tuscany, was recently filming in London; rough cuts were put on a website so that Cunliffe could keep tabs on what was happening. Just a short time ago in London the refrain was “the bike’s here; put the tape on”. Danielle Atkins quit a job in the City and moved to a farmhouse outside Penzance four years ago. She says: “Broadband is fundamental to the way we all operate. When mine goes down I’m at a complete loss.” She runs Coast Consulting, a marketing and brand imaging company that recently won a contract to work for EquaTerra, a New York-based outsourcing company. She has never met anyone from EquaTerra; she conducted all the business through conference calls.
“There are jobs where we don’t even meet the clients,” says Darby. “Ideal.” Cunliffe goes to the capital about once a fortnight: “It’s hard. You have to travel a lot. Face-to-face is still massively important. If a chief executive says ‘We can talk about this tomorrow morning’ you have to jump in the car.” Sometimes he is struck by doubts. “Every now and then someone will say ‘I thought you had retired’ or ‘but you can’t do that down there’ and you will say ‘no, no, no, you are wrong’. London is the coalface.”
All I spoke to were anxious to point out that they were not working any less in Cornwall than they would be in London. Chris Chapman, a self-confessed workaholic, is setting up a brainstorming centre for blue-chip companies near Padstow and is founder of the I’d Rather Be In Cornwall Club, which meets quarterly at the Groucho Club. “Cornwall is a good working environment, not a soft lifestyle option,” he insists. This doesn’t mean that he and the other Cornwallistas don’t believe that their lifetsyles are improved. “The commute across the yard with a cup of tea and a piece of toast is preferable to someone’s armpit on the Northern Line. Life’s too short,” says Atkins. “We work just as hard. But when you have finished, the playground is on your doorstep.” Cunliffe likes to surf before work. “Yes, there are lifestyle compensations. But by nature I’m a worrier and you are only as good as your next series. I worry about losing it. I’m not going back.”
John Berry, managing director of Cornwall Enterprise, likes to use the phrase “cross-shifting” rather than downsizing to describe people who have no intention of seeing their income reduced by working in Cornwall. “We are shifting to a different world, where people are choosing where they want to live rather than saying ‘I have to live there for work’.”
The gross domestic product per head in Cornwall rose by 10 per cent between 2001 and 2003. This brought the average GDP in the county to only 75 per cent of the EU average but it was a marked improvement. In 2004-05 the half million population was boosted by 6,000 from London and the South East. Cornwall is growing faster than any Objective One funded EU region. “It does feel that we are doing something right but we have still got a long way to go. You could argue that somewhere like Brighton has far more creative people,” says Berry.
Those considering a move need to know that property is expensive and in short supply, although that is not a problem unique to the county. Some also grumble that getting your hands on Objective One cash is such a bureaucratic nightmare that it isn’t worth the time it takes. But the phrase “critical mass” is on everyone’s lips, not least because there are worries about other areas of the economy (this month 800 jobs have been lost in the china clay industry). There is optimism that soon there will be enough people in the creative industries that they will grow exponentially. “I think it’s reaching tipping point,” says Atkins. “If it continues, the trickle will become a flood.”
As we chat on the famous surfing beach at Sennen Cove, Darby observes: “We are at work eight hours a day and tearing our hair out.” She seems remarkably relaxed for somebody who has been in negotiation with one of the world’s entertainment giants. As we leave, she and Francis are preparing to head home. The commute is either a half-hour walk along the cliff-top path or a five-minute drive. Francis is planning to fish for bass for supper. It is very tempting to join him, but I have a plane to catch.
