One week to go until Work Beyond Walls.

312 registrations against the 500 Paul needs... and a sneak peek inside the Boiler Shop with Hannah Naylor-Skeats, the Workpattern designer whose job it is to fill it. She doesn't describe herself as 'the floor plan police' for nothing.

Check out this bonus episode to learn:

• What nobody knows yet about the acoustics
• Why one speaker who overruns could ruin a day
• Who's on the registration list
• Which unexpected themes are emerging for the sessions
• What the QR codes throughout the living workplace are for
• And the curse of Eventbrite: why 'free' tickets keep organisers up at night

Featuring Hannah Naylor-Skeats and Philippa Lobb (Workpattern), and Paul Glaister.

Work Beyond Walls takes place at the Boiler Shop, Newcastle, on 9 and 10 September 2026. Attendance is free.

Sign up: workbeyondwalls.uk
Follow Work Beyond Walls on LinkedIn for talks and sessions as they're announced.

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.

Subscribe so you get the next episode as soon as it lands - and if you know someone who needs inspiring about how to make work better, please pass it on.

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 takes place at the Boiler Shop, Newcastle, on 9 and 10 September 2026. Attendance is free.

Sign up: workbeyondwalls.uk
Follow Work Beyond Walls on LinkedIn for talks and sessions as they're announced.

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.

Subscribe so you get the next episode as soon as it lands - and if you know someone who needs inspiring about how to make work better, please pass it on.

Seven weeks before the doors open, Paul Glaister has one registration. Two, if you count the one he entered himself to check the form worked. He needs 500.

This is the story of how a simple request from two interior designers - could you fill a railway arch with furniture for a couple of days? - became a two-day event in the post-industrial building where they built Rocket.

We meet Beth Lawford at GT3 Architects, who asked the question and then refused to take any credit for it. Philippa Lobb, who carried it back to Workpattern. And Paul Glaister, who booked the biggest space he could find in Newcastle, before the event had a name, a brand, a budget, or a single person signed up to attend.

Along the way: why the North East has nowhere to see the furniture it specifies, what Workpattern lost when it gave up the Queen Street studio in 2016, why nobody at the company can quite explain what Paul does, and what a 1989 Kevin Costner movie has to do with any of it.

Featuring Beth Lawford (GT3 Architects), Philippa Lobb and John Lennox (Workpattern), Terry McStea (RTC / Design Network North), and Paul Glaister.

Work Beyond Walls takes place at the Boiler Shop, Newcastle, on 9 and 10 September 2026. Attendance is free.

Sign up: workbeyondwalls.uk
Follow Work Beyond Walls on LinkedIn for talks and sessions as they're announced.

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.

Subscribe so you get the next episode as soon as it lands - and if you know someone who needs inspiring about how to make work better, please pass it on.

Paul Glaister booked the biggest space he could find, then went away to work out what to put in it.

Work Beyond Walls is two days at the Boiler Shop in Newcastle, a former locomotive works, and the kind of event you'd usually have to get a train to London for. Paul needs 500 people to sign up. When we started recording, he had one. Well, two, if you count the one he entered himself to check the form worked.

Series 1 of Work in Motion, from Workpatten, is a six-part series about whether he can pull it off. Not an advert for the event - an honest account of building something ambitious in a region that's never had one, with full access and no shying away from the numbers.

Episode 1 is out Wednesday 12th August. Subscribe so you don't miss a thing.

Work Beyond Walls takes place at the Boiler Shop, Newcastle, on 9 and 10 September 2026. Attendance is free.

Sign up: workbeyondwalls.uk
Follow Work Beyond Walls on LinkedIn for talks and sessions as they're announced.

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.

Subscribe so you get the next episode as soon as it lands - and if you know someone who needs inspiring about how to make work better, please pass it on.