Shanklin, Lacock, Polperro, Lynmouth, Staithes, Mousehole. No, we’re not reading the register at a posh private school (Be quiet, Staithes!). Instead, these are officially some of the most Instagrammable villages in the UK – and, should lockdown living have persuaded you to seek out greener pastures, they are all waiting for you, in far-out places like the Isle of Wight, Wiltshire, Yorkshire, Devon and Cornwall.
Responding to reports of a rise in buyers leaving London, personal finance firm Bankrate took it upon itself to identify which areas are home to the most “picture-perfect villages”, based on what passes for a reliable metric in 2020: their number of hashtags on Instagram.
Taking top spot is Clovelly in north Devon, which boasts an astonishing 134,353 hashtags. Portmeirion in Wales has to settle for second place with 114,323, which, to Diary, indicates only one thing: there probably isn’t much overlap in the Venn diagram of ardent ’grammers and fans of TV’s The Prisoner.
JLL’s big news… from CBRE?
CBRE let the proverbial cat out of the bag in its latest Central London Office MarketView report, revealing that its rival, JLL, had finally brought its two-year-plus search for a new home to a close and was under offer on more than 134,000 sq ft at British Land’s Broadgate Campus. After the story was broken (by, ahem, EG) CBRE, it seems, removed the report and issued a replacement, sans the information about JLL in its “key under offers” table. The new report lists multiple tenants under offer on a combined 79,000 sq ft at Soho Estates’ Ilona Rose House development near Tottenham Court Road station. However, the original details indicated that JLL appears to have slimmed down its new HQ requirement from 180,000 sq ft as of October 2017. No word as yet on whether the agent is departing the West End for good or plans to maintain a satellite office in the area – or, indeed, where the news on that will come from…
This is England
To Shakespeare, England was “this precious stone set in the silver sea”. Keats was content to “see no other verdure than its own”. And for many it will forever be Blake’s “green and pleasant land”. We’re not all quite so poetic, of course. And none less so, it seems, than Google Maps. Search for “England”, ask for directions and the service takes you to a shed. Well, Sainsbury’s distribution centre in Daventry, to be precise. Diary has long known sheds are sexy. We can now confirm they are romantic too.
Pump up the volume
After more than four months away from London, Diary is starting to forget what office life is like entirely – but, it seems, many workers have much longer memories… of just how noisy their colleagues are.
Central London office developer CO—RE polled more than 1,000 office workers to discover which city has the loudest workplaces. And, as we gradually emerge from lockdown, it found that employees in Birmingham, London and Southampton are the “most likely to be dreading a return to the office”.
Brum – which is so loud even its popular abbreviation is onomatopoeic – came out top, with more than 55% of workers admitting to using headphones to drown out colleagues. Half of those polled from London and Southampton use the same noise-cancellation technique, but in Cardiff only just over a quarter have resorted to the tactic, making the Welsh capital home of “the UK’s most considerate colleagues”, followed closely by Belfast.
Could it all be down to the cities’ respective accents?
Computing a commute
When Sineesh Keshav joined Prologis to take on the role of chief technology officer, the global team was expecting great things from the ultimate “solutions man”. Well known for eliminating problems and smoothing processes in his previous roles at Experian and American Express, he did not disappoint.
But Keshav’s approach to path-smoothing was not just limited to office hours. The Bay Area-based CTO also applied his skills to his commute, spending the first week in his new job trouble-shooting his route.
From tracking the impact of where he parked at the railway station to monitoring traffic flow and observing the number of people at every stage of his commute, he was able to cut his travel time by half.
Proof from the outset that he was always destined to take Prologis in the right direction.
