Few might have realised when the Covod-19 pandemic struck that one of the most notable lasting consequences would be a dramatic change in working practices.
While lockdown confined many to working from home where possible, the lifting of restrictions did not bring about the big return to the office, despite this being advocated by senior voices in commerce and government, including then chancellor and now prime minister Rishi Sunak.
All over the UK, people might have been delighted to return to pubs and football grounds, not to mention getting their kids back in the classroom. But home comforts, the avoidance of cold winter morning commutes and the practical benefits of being able to still be at home when the plumber / courier / online shopping delivery arrived became all too convenient for some to give up.
There may be few better places to get a home office than Aberdeen. After all, the Granite City is the northernmost city of significant size in the UK, whatever anyone in Inverness claims. The cold wind whistling in off the North Sea may be off-putting to visiting football teams at Pittodrie, but why put up with it on the way to work?
It is not just the climate that you should consider. Even by Scottish standards, this is a city where transport infrastructure is somewhat lacking.
True, Edinburgh’s trams took a very long time to arrive and both building the original line and adding the extension through Leith to Newhaven have been enormously disruptive, but the fact remains it is there. As for Glasgow, the perpetual failure to ever expand the Subway may be Scotland’s longest-running joke, but at least it still has one of the UK’s most extensive mainline rail systems.
By contrast, Aberdeen and Dundee are the poor relations, with little beyond one central station. In the Aberdonian case, for a city of more than 200,000 people to have no stations apart from the city centre and airport is clearly inadequate. If this sounds like the rail-wrecking handiwork of Dr Beeching in the 1960s, that’s because it is.
The Campaign For North-East Rail published proposals in 2021 to reverse this by opening new lines and stations in the city and out across Aberdeenshire, but let us not hold our breath: Yes, the Borders line from Edinburgh to Galashiels made a comeback, but if the trams can take so long and the Subway route remains as it did on its opening day in 1896, expectations need to be managed.
This leaves Aberdeen residents dependent on cars and buses to get from the suburbs to the city centre, with limited crossings over the Dee and Don compounding matters. True, the bypass around the western periphery opened in 2019 helps a bit, but it doesn’t solve traffic congestion in the city centre.
All that means Aberdeen is currently just the kind of place where working from home makes sense as much as anywhere in the UK. So if you were thinking of getting the furnishings in to make a home office a reality, it makes sense to do it now.
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