Cooperation between coworking hubs in London is growing!

Even whilst competition and marketing spends grow aggressively.

We’re noticing an insane amount of growth in the coworking sector in London, with mergers and acquisitions already hitting the books across the city and many spaces entering or expanding across the city (and the world).

I recently chatted with SocialWorkplaces about the city’s looming price-war as growing businesses realise they have more spending power and can almost always find multiple potential workspace providers.

However, we’re also seeing a growing amount of collaboration between community operators, both through events like COW and Coworking Coterie; as well as via sharing buying-power and member rewards.

This week however we saw another kind of collaboration, one that’s normally unspoken off and one I think needs much more highlighting.

Every coworking community needs to offer their members, at the very least, a safe space with decent coffee, great wifi and a friendly community. In highly uncommon scenarios, each of these elements can fall outside of the operators control.

Earlier this week, damage to a fiber cable disrupted the internet connectivity of one of our partner communities. We pinged a few of our partner communities around their location, to see if they’d be able to help out and host any members who were being affected by the connectivity issues.

The very awesome teams at both EDSPACE and BDCWorks stepped up, opened their doors and offered free day passes to all members affected via the outage.

Although the internet connectivity was restored before the workspace opened the next morning, I love the fact that these community operators embraced the notion of inter-workspace community collaboration.

Thank you EDSPACE and BDCWorks teams for being so very awesome!

If you run a community that ‘gets’ that collaboration enriches memberships, and further enables entrepreneurship — please do join our global network.

If you’re looking for a coworking space that does everything in it’s power to enable your business (even if it illogical in the short-term), here’s a great place to start your search.

tl;dr — even though spaces are competing on the surface, behind the scenes they’re collaborating to help their members grow their businesses sustainably. Eg offering free day passes to members of a space that’s hit by unfortunate connectivity issues.