WeWork to open 1,000-member site in Station Road, Cambridge
WeWork, the global network offering office and coworking spaces, is coming to Cambridge.
It plans to open at 50-60 Station Road, in the CB1 area close to the city's main railway station, by the end of the year.
The site will offer space for freelancers and start-ups, mid-size companies and major enterprises, which will benefit from services, wellbeing and information classes and a global community.
Mathieu Proust, WeWork's general manager for the UK and Ireland, told the Cambridge Independent: “It’s very exciting news.
“We currently operate in London, Manchester and we recently announced Edinburgh. We are super excited to be coming to Cambridge by the end of the year.
“You will see roughly 1,000 members - by which we mean an employee of one of the companies that works within our building.
“There are three types - the start-ups, the mid-size and there are enterprise companies. Today, 40 per cent are enterprise companies, which is roughly what you will see in Cambridge.
“We offer workspace and services. The services are everything you need to run the company, like your IT and your conference rooms.”
But the WeWork concept, launched in 2010, goes well beyond bricks and mortar, running events and building a community in each city it operates.
“We run wellness classes in the morning, which could be a yoga class, or boxing class. At lunch we do ‘lunch and learns’. We pick a topic - now we are marking one year of GDPR, so we’ve done a class on that, and we’ve done a class on accounting. We ask our members.
“At night, we might have events on specific topics, like bitcoin.
“Then we offer a community. When we come into a city, our job is to create a community. That’s what we’ve been doing in London and Manchester.
“There are communal areas - the spaces where people are able to connect. Often it’s when they are waiting for their coffee. The rest of the building is workspaces..
“Our app enables us to connect not only in Cambridge but to open up to other cities in the UK, and across Europe and around the world.
“We have 466,000 members around the world. So if you want to extend your business into New York, or Shanghai, that’s when naturally the network kicks in.”
This network is one of the reasons WeWork has come to Cambridge - it offers an attractive city for some of its global companies to have a base, with its pool of talent.
The company has previously brought its Creator Awards to the city, attracting much interest.
Now Mathieu expects a diverse group in Cambridge, ready to embrace the WeWork way of doing things.
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