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The most valuable takeaways at any industry gathering aren’t always from the main stage. They happen in smaller rooms, where attendees bring their real operational challenges and tangible data, rather than just their polished marketing decks. At GCUC UK Manchester, we broke away from traditional presentations into three parallel workshops in Lower Campfield. Built specifically […]

There was no better way to close the day at GCUC UK Manchester than a conversation about the city we were sitting in. Shazia Mustafa of Inclusive Placemaking Co sat for a fireside with Michael Ingall, the developer behind Spinningfields, St John’s and the Campfield campus that hosted GCUC UK, for the closing fireside of […]

The UK coworking industry still talks about itself as if it begins at Old Street and ends in Shoreditch. The Q2 2026 data from CoworkingCafe suggests it should probably stop doing that. London dominates? That is not the story. Greater London accounts for 1,275 of the UK’s 4,415 spaces. Roughly a quarter of the total, […]

Yardi’s Paul Rowe and Christopher Cole closed the GCUC UK Manchester stage in June with an argument that ran against the grain of most AI for flex operators conversations: the tool is rarely the problem. The data underneath it is. It is not a small thing to get right. Flex runs on thin margins, somewhere […]

The argument for regional flex tends to be made in London, by people looking outward. At GCUC UK Manchester, a session called The Regional Opportunity + The Data Gap flipped that on its head, handing the floor to operators who have actually built and scaled outside the capital. It was part market analysis, part panel, […]

At GCUC UK Manchester, The Generous Operator session had a deceptively simple premise: you have to earn the right to be generous. It was about understanding the commercial work that creates the headroom for the gestures that matter, whether that’s for your members, your team, or your wider community. So what does it look like […]

The coworking industry has a habit of talking to itself. Operators compare notes with operators, vendors pitch vendors, and the person who actually signs the contract and sits at the desk is often left somewhere down the hall. We opened GCUC UK Manchester by doing the exact opposite, with a session called The Occupier’s Brief, […]

Every coworking brand says it sells community. Very few can tell you what that community is actually worth, or how to measure coworking community metrics. Beyond the RSVP, a panel chaired by Tilley Harris of Akou, set out to close that gap. The discussion was refreshingly honest about the fact that the flex space sector […]

Manchester has a habit of making the case for itself. This year GCUC UK came to Campfield, the old air and space museum that Allied London has turned into a working media campus in the heart of St John’s, and spent the day doing something the coworking industry rarely does: putting the voice of the […]