“I just want to be able to do a little bit of work and be near enough my kids to continue feeding or to be able to help out and know what’s going on with them.”

Unreasonable Connection Going Live! London, February 2026.

🎟️ Tickets go on sale in January 2026.

The entire day is co-created by the coworking community builders on the co-creation waitlist.

Forty thousand (ish) coworking spaces exist worldwide.

One hundred and twenty of them offer childcare.

Georgia Norton spent 2025 tracking them down. She interviewed founders from Sydney to Washington State, Berlin, and Athens. She pored over floor plans, took virtual tours, and visited spaces in person across the US.

She found the operational models, yes.

But she also found the graveyard—roughly forty more that tried and couldn’t make it work.

Georgia worked with Playhood in Crouch End, North London. A micro-nursery integrated with a coworking space.

Children aged 18 months to five years old learned and played while their parents worked nearby. Karen Partcher, the founder, had renovated a Victorian terrace house to create a 34-square-metre studio in the garden.

Eight children maximum. One neighbourhood. Deep roots.

Her research, published on 17 December 2025 through the US think tank New America, reveals something uncomfortable.

The glossy, high-end childcare-coworking experiments all folded. The Wing. The Jane Club. Second Home. Even Impact Hub couldn’t sustain it.

The settings that survived weren’t private-equity-backed family clubs in central business districts. They were neighbourhood-scale operations run by mums who refused to choose between career and proximity to their children.

Every founder Georgia interviewed was a mother.

Every one of them had reached a point where the existing system—commute to work, outsource childcare to a distant silo, pretend you don’t have kids during business hours—stopped making sense.

Bernie brings his own memory to this. When his son was born, the only coworking space with childcare he could find in London was Shazia Mustafa’s Third Door. Getting from Ilford to Putney with a pushchair felt like a bridge too far.

The geography of exclusion. The exhaustion of separation.

Timeline Highlights

[00:04] Bernie frames the episode: “She’s tracked down 100 coworking spaces around the world that have some form of childcare and coworking offering.”

[01:21] Georgia on what she’s known for: “Saying, ‘But what if?’ and ‘Have you met so and so?’”

[02:28] The New America report announcement: “December 17th, this think tank called New America is publishing my report.”

[05:00] The numbers that matter: “120 operational right now... I stumbled across the graveyard, if you will, of about another 40 settings that had experimented with the model and not found it sustainable.”

[08:42] Georgia on the core problem: “When you have a kid, your relationship to your work will change. There’s no way to insulate your worlds, to keep them separate forever.”

[11:17] The research finding that stopped Bernie: “Interestingly, in the research, all of the founders were mums.”

[13:50] The design philosophy: “You can’t give everything to everyone all the time.”

[18:38] Georgia’s conviction: “I wholeheartedly think that colocating care with spaces to develop our workforce and to explore our careers and to defend remote working are transformative at the neighbourhood level.”

[21:05] The graveyard of corporate attempts: “Places like The Wing and the Jane Club and big employer initiatives, they quietly folded away this option.”

[24:02] Pandemic communities that thrived: “During the pandemic, we thrived as a little micro-community. We set up community dynamics that sustain us now.”

[27:05] The design revelation: “That boundary wasn’t like a strong doorway that no one was allowed across. It was this really permeable threshold.”

[29:38] Children's understanding work: “They would tap, tap on a fake laptop because they knew... these kids know what their parents do for a living.”

[34:17] The barrier nobody talks about: “The whole Ofsted context is really intimidating... We’ve made it really hard to try and design the type of settings we want for our kids.”

[35:56] The research gap: “There’s just no research being done on this model.”

[40:08] Where to find Georgia’s work: “At our website, playhood.club”

The Graveyard Nobody Talks About

Georgia found roughly forty childcare-coworking spaces that had closed.

Not struggling. Closed.

The pattern was unmistakable. The high-end experiments folded. The Wing tried it. Jane Club tried it. Second Home tried it.

Big-employer initiatives from Yahoo to Patagonia to Goldman Sachs in the 1990s sought to bolt childcare into corporate workspaces.

They all quietly removed the option.

Different reasons—cost centres, zoning regulations, the sheer difficulty of bridging two different regulatory frameworks—but the same outcome. The spaces that survived weren’t in central business districts. They weren’t funded by private equity. They weren’t trying to serve everyone.

Bernie put it bluntly during the conversation: childcare and coworking for the one per cent.

The big shiny spaces in the centre of town, where housing a child costs the price of a small car every month. Georgia’s research confirms they’re not sustainable.

What works is neighbourhood-scale integration. True integration, not bolt-on amenities.

Spaces where childcare workers use the coworking facilities to get their teaching licences or start side businesses. Where parents’ careers become part of the children’s learning—a doctor parent visits to talk about their work, a civil engineer grandad explains what they do.

The Permeable Threshold

The design insight that changed how Georgia understands these spaces: the boundary between work and childcare doesn’t need to be a hard wall.

At Playhood, Karen Partcher renovated a Victorian terrace house. It looks like every other house on the street. But in the garden, she created a 34-square-metre studio. Purpose-built at a child scale.

The threshold wasn’t a door that stayed closed.

It was permeable. Parents visible. Children aware. Staff flow between spaces.

Georgia found this pattern in settings across the world. The assumption that children must be hidden for serious work to happen got blown out of the water when she actually visited and interviewed founders.

Children in these spaces grow up knowing what their parents do for a living.

They see work happening. They tap on fake laptops because they understand the rhythm. Georgia finds this sociologically fascinating—what happens to a generation’s relationship with work when they grow up understanding you can defend the right to work on your own terms, in your own neighbourhood?

The parents change, too.

Georgia mentioned an unpublished post she wrote: an apology to schools. Because families who experience this level of integration come to expect collaboration with everyone who cares for their children.

Traditional school feels jarring after that.

The Pandemic Catalyst

The pandemic tore down the wall between work and care for millions of families.

Children walked in on Zoom calls. The discourse focused frustratingly on working from home as a blanket term, as though everyone could stay in their houses.

Georgia points to something different.

The pandemic catalysed a new wave of founders—predominantly women—who discovered how difficult it was to work and care in the same room and decided they didn’t want to compromise anymore.

These weren’t people building amenity lists for membership tiers.

They were mothers who had paused or parked their careers and decided to create settings where desk space sat right next to provisions for their children.

Georgia gathered stories from founders who were almost nervous to confess this: during the pandemic, their micro-communities thrived.

Playhood in London. The Haven Collection in Rhode Island. Settings in Tacoma, Washington.

While the world collapsed around them, these tiny neighbourhoods helped one another. Created bonds that sustain them now.

If there’s a recipe for neighbourhood-level crisis resilience, Georgia wants the world to know it.

Why All the Founders Were Mums

Bernie asked directly: When you say a new group of people, do you mean men?

Georgia’s answer was unambiguous.

Every founder in her research was a mother. Everyone.

This isn’t an academic observation. It’s data about who carries the burden of solving the care crisis.

Women who had careers before. Maybe backgrounds in marketing or community building. But women who reached the point where the traditional separation between work and care no longer made sense for their lives.

The discourse around flexible working pretended everyone had the same needs.

Georgia noticed something different: some mums found a middle ground, who knew about the power of coworking, who got together with others to do work while staying close to their children.

The spectrum she maps runs from extremely casual and ad hoc—cooperatives taking turns, nannies watching kids in small pieces, flying under licensing radar—to fully enrolled nursery schools with qualified educators, planned curriculum, children attending all day while the corresponding parent works in the coworking space next door.

No hierarchy between the two activities.

Meaningful work on your own terms. Enriching education for the children. That was what Playhood tried to achieve.

The Regulatory Wall

Georgia doesn’t soften this part.

The whole Ofsted context is really intimidating.

* The paperwork.

* The insurance.

* The licences.

* The zoning inspections.

We’ve made it extraordinarily difficult to design the settings we actually want for our children.

This isn’t bureaucratic inconvenience. It’s a system designed to exclude.

When Georgia talks about the graveyard of closed spaces, she’s also talking about the founders who intended to open but couldn’t overcome the barriers.

People who had the energy, the vision, the community need, and couldn’t navigate the regulatory maze.

There’s no research being done on this model. No public funding routes. No established pathway for someone who wants to integrate childcare and coworking at the neighbourhood level.

Georgia is trying to change that.

Her New America report is solutions journalism—gathering stories from practice, sharing what works, and providing evidence that the energy for this solution is much bigger than what currently exists.

The Industrial Revolution Comparison

Georgia draws a line from the current moment back to the early 1900s.

The Industrial Revolution changed families’ relationships to work. Children worked factory shifts alongside parents.

People like Maria Montessori and Margaret MacMillan created neighbourhood-level solutions.

Nursery schools. Public health initiatives at the local level in London. Experiments were conducted when it seemed economically impossible for families to thrive amid technological change and shifts in the world of work.

We take those solutions for granted now.

We forget they were invented in response to a crisis.

Georgia believes something similar happened with the pandemic. It feels as big to her as that earlier transformation.

We needed better solutions.

The neighbourhood coworking spaces with integrated childcare aren’t amenities. They’re prototypes for how families might actually live through this transition.

The Neighbourhood Power Connection

Bernie mentioned watching John Alexander, Indy, and Imandeep discuss neighbourhood power the night before recording.

Georgia was one of the eight people who responded to say it was worth watching.

What touched her: not waiting for permission.

You don’t need to keep coming up with business plans, coordinating funding, and doing everything officially. Sometimes you have to be the change.

Georgia tried this in a Washington, D.C., suburb after moving to the States.

She started a parents’ coworking club. Booked community centre rooms. Offered something lovely and beautiful for free.

It was so much work for so little response.

The social fabric wasn’t there. No serendipity. The school world is separate from the work world, which is separate from the neighbourhood.

She did it anyway. Kept telling people it was a good idea.

That’s the connective tissue between coworking citizenship and childcare integration.

Both require believing that proximity creates community. Both require acting before the systems catch up. Both require neighbourhood-scale thinking over central business district efficiency.

Links and Resources

Georgia Norton’s Work

* Georgia on LinkedIn

* Playhood website

* Gen Z Doesn’t Need ‘Severance’—They Need Shared Spaces for Work and Care

* New America report: publishing 17 December 2025 (link to follow)

Mentioned in Episode

* Jon Alexander, Indy Johar, and Immy Kaur on YouTube How to Save Democracy: Neighbourhood Power

* ACTionism documentary screenings

Projects & Community

* Join this and other conversations with people in the LinkedIn Coworking Group

* Unreasonable Connection Monthly online gatherings for Coworking Community Builders.

* Workspace Design Show London 2026

* European Coworking Day May 2026

* London Coworking Assembly

* European Coworking Assembly

Bernie’s Projects

* London Coworking Assembly 5-Day AI Crash Course for Coworking Spaces

* Connect with Bernie on LinkedIn

One More Thing

Coworking brings communities together, helping people find and share their voices.

Each episode of the Coworking Values Podcast explores Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability—values that shape the spaces where we gather, work, and grow.

If this resonates with you, rate, follow, and share the podcast. Your support helps others discover how coworking enriches lives, builds careers, and strengthens communities.

Community is the key. 🔑

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit coworkingvaluespodcast.substack.com