2. Not embarrassingly empty

Five weeks out. Fifty-one registrations of the 500 Paul needs. The optimism-o-meter hasn't moved all week.

Everyone who tries to build a workplace design event starts by copying Clerkenwell Design Week. In this episode we find out why you can't - from the woman who curates its talks programme - and what you do instead.

Katie Richardson explains that Clerkenwell works because of where it is, not what it is, and explains the closed loop every new event has to crack: brands come if you have visitors, visitors come if you have brands.

Meanwhile, Dave James has spent four years building a version called ClerkenWales in a converted chapel in Cardiff, and Herb Kim, who has run Thinking Digital in the North East for seventeen years, is disarmingly honest about his own first year - where the target isn't a full room... it's a room that isn't embarrassingly empty.

Also: what Work Beyond Walls actually is, why Darren Richardson told Paul that if he didn't use the name he'd take it and do it better himself, a thirty-year-old government publication nobody else spotted, and what would have to be true to get a magazine publisher in Stoke on a train.

Featuring Katie Richardson, Dave James (BLOKKA), Herb Kim (Thinking Digital), Darren Richardson (Gardiner Richardson), Mark Eltringham (Workplace Insight), Will Easton, Terry McStea (RTC / Design Network North) and Paul Glaister.

Work Beyond Walls took place at the Boiler Shop, Newcastle, on 9 and 10 September 2026.

workbeyondwalls.uk

Follow Work Beyond Walls on LinkedIn for future event announcements.

Work in Motion, series 1: The inside story of Work Beyond Walls, is written and presented by Ian Ellison, and produced by Dave Crackles, for Workpattern.

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