Build It Before They’re Buying

⚡️Community & Creator Notes⚡️

Bowie turned down the knighthood. He knew what the invitation costs.

I’ve been sitting with the ten-year anniversary of Bowie’s death for a week now.

I’ve only recently started to be able to listen to Black Star. I am still in awe and shock at how Bowie made his exit.

January 10th came and went. My feed filled up with Ziggy Stardust tributes and “Changes” lyrics. Everyone posting the same photographs. The lightning bolt. The Thin White Duke.

They’re missing the point.

Bowie didn’t wait for a market to exist.

He invented himself in suburban Bromley before anyone was asking. Before there was demand for what he was doing. Before anyone gave him permission.

He was an insurgent in the suburbs. Making weird art in a place that wasn’t supposed to produce weird art. Experimenting with mime, Buddhism, folk music, whatever caught his attention — failing publicly, repeatedly, for years.

His first album flopped. His second album flopped. He kept going.

The myth says genius arrives fully formed. It’s messier. Bowie built himself in public, one failed experiment at a time, until something finally caught.

And when they finally came knocking with the velvet rope?

He turned down the CBE in 2000. Turned down a knighthood in 2003. Twice, they offered him the inside. Twice, he said no.

He knew what it costs to get invited. You owe them. You’re theirs.

Bowie said something once that I keep coming back year after year:

“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

That’s not innovation. That’s discomfort as a compass.

Culture Grows in the Cracks

Robert Elms was part of the Blitz Club — the Bowie fans who stopped waiting for someone to throw them a party and started their own night.

He’s been telling a story lately that I can’t shake.

New York City in 1975. The city was bankrupt. Literally broke. And in that chaos, in those abandoned buildings and cheap rents, the city invented disco, punk, and hip-hop. Within five years. From the absolute poorest moment came the most creative.

London has its own version.

• Sex Pistols forming above Malcolm McLaren’s shop on King’s Road.
• The Bromley Contingent turning Bowie fandom into punk before punk had a name — Siouxsie Sioux in a Bromley bedroom before she was anyone.
• Soul II Soul starting from the Africa Centre in Covent Garden.
• Carl Cox putting his DJ gear on a bus to get to gigs in South London.
• Amy Winehouse in Camden jazz clubs before Camden became a tourist market.
• So Solid Crew from garages in Battersea.
• Stormzy from Thornton Heath before grime became Radio 1 playlists.

Sade wrote “Your Love Is King” in a Tottenham squat.

Every generation finds cracks. Makes something. Then capital shows up and smooths out the edges.

London is being covered in luxury glass now. Every warehouse becoming flats. The Africa Centre redeveloped. Bagley’s gone. WAG Club a memory.

So where do the arrivals go? Where do the Bowies of 2026 make their weird art before anyone’s asking?

Behind the Big Blue Doors

Five minutes from Lewisham Station. Behind big blue doors. That’s where.

Michael Korn spent 15 years inventing hospital screens, scaling a manufacturing business. He kept asking one question: why does inventing have to be so lonely, so expensive, so gatekept?

He saw what happens to graduates. You spend three years at university with access to lathes, mills, 3D printers, everything you need. Then you graduate. It’s gone. You’re in your shed with a card table and limited tools. Alone.

That’s where most hardware inventions die.

So Michael built Blue Garage. You walk in and it hits you — the smell of sawdust and solder, the whir of machines, someone’s prototype taking shape on a workbench. Lathes, mills, 3D printers, a textiles lab, a microfactory. Equipment that used to be locked away, now open to anyone scaling a hardware business.

You pay for your desk like a coworking space. But you get access to tools that would cost hundreds of thousands to buy yourself. And you get other people doing the same thing.

AI will take the desk jobs. But making things? We’re going to want more of it. More locally. By people we can see. Not shipped from factories polluting someone else’s air.

The future is going to be more like the past than the present.

What the Industry Isn’t Talking About

Scroll LinkedIn. Go to a coworking conference. The conversation is flat whites and occupancy rates. Enterprise sales. Brand partnerships. Amenity wars. Coworking for the 1%.

Meanwhile, the middle class is being hollowed out.

There’s a comfortable version of “reclaiming coworking” doing the rounds. It says the co means “together.” That community isn’t a nice-to-have. That people are craving connection.

All true. But it glosses over WHY.

Why are people lonely? Why do they need connection? What is breaking them?

The top 12 episodes of the Coworking Values Podcast in 2025 answer those questions. Not brand partnerships. Not enterprise strategies.

Money trauma. Burnout. Collapsing systems. People filling gaps the state left open.

Jaskiran Mangat on money trauma and financial resilience. DeShawn Brown on community managers burning out doing eight jobs. NHS workers doing health checks in coworking spaces because the health service is overwhelmed. Mums who stopped waiting for permission to integrate childcare and work.

Williamz Omope appears twice.

He runs job clubs in East London coworking spaces because Job Centres can’t keep up. He brings NHS workers in because the system is overwhelmed. Two of the most-listened-to episodes are the same man, filling gaps the state keeps leaving open.

That’s not cupcakes and community hugs.

The co in coworking isn’t just about connection. It’s about mutual aid. It’s about what happens when the systems that were supposed to catch people... don’t.

Read the full Top 12 breakdown here.

Not a Motivational Poster

“Be a creator, not a consumer.”

You’ve seen that phrase on Instagram. It sounds like a poster you’d find in a WeWork. Something to make you feel entrepreneurial while you pay for overpriced coffee.

I mean something different.

When only 0.24% of venture capital funding went to Black founders between 2009 and 2019, enterprise education isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s survival strategy. That’s less than one penny of every pound invested.

Kofi Oppong isn’t building a charity. He’s building an alternative to a system that’s mathematically broken.

When 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t been invented yet, waiting for someone to offer you a position is a losing game. The system wasn’t built for you. It was built for the people who were already inside it.

Making things — actually making things — isn’t a hobby. It’s how you stay alive.

Solidarity in Numbers

Brian Eno made the Berlin trilogy with Bowie. Low. Heroes. Lodger. Forty years later, he wrote the foreword to Jon Alexander’s book Citizens.

In a conversation at The Conduit back in 2025, Eno said this:

“The only thing we have since we’re not billionaires is solidarity in numbers. That’s all we’ve got going for us really. They’ve got all the money.”

He talked about revolutions happening in two phases. The first phase is where everybody realises that things have gone completely wrong. The phase we’re in now.

The second phase — the important one — is where everybody realises that everybody else has realised it as well.

“At that point, that’s when you get a big change. You look around and you think: we’re all in the same mind. We all know it. And we start to build something else.”

We’re in a revolution now. Trouble is we didn’t recognise it because we didn’t start it. We expected the revolution to come from the left but it came from the right.

So it’s time to start another one.

The First Bernie

A game designer named Bernard De Koven coined the word “coworking” in 1999. I only discovered him a few years ago, which tells you how thoroughly the industry forgot its own origin story.

De Koven’s coworking wasn’t about shared office space. It was social technology — a way to fundamentally alter how people work together without the hierarchy that separates them by rank and salary level.

No revenue models. No scaling strategies. No premium amenities. Just humans figuring out how to collaborate without the corporate bullshit that usually kills genuine partnership.

He called a Frisbee in the hands of business people “a weapon against fear.”

The result, when it worked, was “productivity, community, and, surprisingly often, deeply shared fun.”

That’s the Creator in “Community & Creator Notes.” Not creator as in influencer. Creator as in maker.

Siouxsie in Bromley. Soul II Soul at the Africa Centre. Amy in Camden. Stormzy in Thornton Heath before anyone was paying attention. Now it’s Michael Korn behind blue doors in Lewisham. Williamz Omope running job clubs in East London.

Same energy. Different decade. Feet not quite touching the bottom.

Coworking was designed to be collaborative social technology — not just another real estate product for the professional class.

That’s the same velvet rope Bowie turned down twice.

And the only way through is to stop waiting for the invitation and build your own door.

Come Find the Others

On February 24th, we’re doing something I’ve wanted to do for years.

Unreasonable Connection Live - The London Coworking Assembly Forum at Blue Garage in Lewisham.

This isn’t Davos for coworking. This isn’t the conference where people fly in on private jets to talk about sustainability, collect their goodie bags, and fuck off home.

45 tickets already gone. Limited to 150 people. BarCamp format — which means you help shape what happens. You don’t just show up and consume. You get involved.

No keynote speakers. No gurus. No vendor pitches. Just community builders workshopping real problems in small groups, then pooling solutions. The expertise in the room, unlocked through a structure that serves shared purpose rather than individual ego.

This is what De Koven called “working together as equals.” This is our version of the Blitz Club. Not nostalgia. Not recreation. The same energy, different decade.

A room full of people who stopped waiting for someone else to build the thing.

Get on the waitlist for tickets here when they go on sale soon.

See you in Lewisham.

Bernie’s Picks This Week

🎟️ Event: Unreasonable Connection Live! — London Coworking Assembly Forum, Feb 24th at Blue Garage. This is the one.

🎟️ Event: ACTionism Spotlight with Parisa Wright — 30th Jan. Parisa runs Greener & Cleaner in Bromley. Yes, that Bromley. The lineage continues.

🎟️ Event: Workspace Design Show London — 25th/26th Feb. I’ll be there. Come say hello.

📄 Reading: Urban MBA Education White Paper — Kofi Oppong on education in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The 0.24% stat comes from here. Read it.

📄 Reading: What Coworking Operators Actually Listened to in 2025 — The full Top 12 podcast breakdown. Not what you’d expect.

🎧 Listening: How Contingent Works Educated Their Local Council on Coworking — Ewan Buck on going from invisible to indispensable.

🎥 Watching: Adventures in Democracy with Bette Adriaans, Brian Eno and Jon Alexander — The conversation I referenced above. Eno on solidarity. Bette on what happens when you actually show up.

🎥 Watching: Bowie on Discomfort — The full “feet not touching the bottom” advice. Two minutes that might change how you work.

Thank you for your time and attention today!

Bernie 💚🍉

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