ABSTRACT
Chapter 2, Recording, traces the history of the office from its very early beginnings in twelfth-century Europe in Italy specifically, through to the arrival of coffee houses and counting houses in London in the seventeenth century. The chapter then describes the emergence of recognisably modern offices buildings in the eighteenth century, which evolved into the clerical factories of the later nineteenth century. The story then moves to the rise of the ‘corporate’ office in the twentieth century. The chapter describes the growing maturity of the office economy and its coming of age with the rise of knowledge work and the digital workplace in the late twentieth century. This later phase is then described in terms of a catalyst to a rebirth in London’s fortunes in the late twentieth century.
