Industrial Estates: classic or dud / Tell me about where you work...

a crummy Industrial estate right by the A40, the view from my window is of a road with two empty warehouses on one side, a pipe merchants on the other and a large importer of Italian food (no sales counter unfortunately)

I'm ten minutes amble from the tube and the nearest shops (which are crap anyway).

It's shit here and I'm so glad to be leaving.

Right on Oxford Street which means bye bye salary I am too close to the shops. I have a view of a church steeple & the Post Office tower. Delightful.

Also just off Oxford Street, down the road from Emma. I mainly have a view of my workmate Paul and a pillar covered in flatplans. If I look across the room and out of the window I can see a tree and the offices above New Look and Cecil Gee. I buy my lunch in Marks and Spencers usually or in one of the bars/ pubs behind the office.

i used to have a lovely window, then a teeny window, now no window. it has been 3 years now in this dark cubicle and still no sign of life. shops round here are rubb (ahem). no reckid shops. One bonus is The Gate, num num veg restaurant.

I work in a nasty 60s office block to the rear of Edinburgh Castle - if i crane my neck i can see part of the rock that the castle stands on - Princes Street is a couple of minutes walk away so i can't complain.

i go to the work canteen most days and eat at my desk - what with the inclement weather here and the hassle of actually putting my coat on and crossing the road i prefer to just pop down the stairs and see what slop they're serving up for lunchies.

business park (posh name for industrial estate) off the a4. isolated

60s campus showing signs of wear and tear and currently undergoing mucho rebuilding works, some in my college. Senior staff and those w/ clout get lake view (ducks, geese etc; always very charming to walk across campus, though excessive wildfowl shit can be unpleasant; also there are rabbits). Mine looks out on car park, various prefabs and the bottle recycling bin. 25 minute walk into town. Lunch = canteen downstairs, where food is lovingly rendered unappetising but Doreen and Liz are lovely. Or you can walk to Browns in the village and get a nice-ish sandwich. There was much excitement when a supermarket opened last year, but since it turned out to be a cruddy Costcutter it's barely worth the walk; plus it's depressing see the new PFI built shopping space with hardly any of the shop spaces let.

I am in an industrial estate, but it is a rather small one which is right by the Thames in Oxford. I work in a very big open plan office with floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides. To my left I look over our car park, with a large, avant garde silver warehouse on the far side, beyond which is a wooded hill. At the top of the hill I can see some houses and the spire of the Westminster College (part of Oxford Brookes uni) chapel. To my right, the view is obscured by the trees along the towpath, but I can see the river with narrowboats on it and Oxford city centre, with the dome of the Radcliffe Camera (part of Bodelian library) just visible above the sixties brutalism of the Oxfordshire County Council offices.

"Business Park" / HellHole just off the A3, surrounded by security thanks to British Aerospace.

No view, grey furniture, Only the divine smell of the British Bakeries factory down the road. Spend lunch times walking round the "Garden" smelling bread baking.

In the middle of two large windows, both of which look out onto Scotland Yard. The window in FRONT! of me looks out over the Civil Service Club and poss the Nigerian Embassy, although it may be the back of some other organisation. BEHIND me are the POLICE STABLES in a GRATE old building. Horse, the coolest horse in the world, lives on the first floor. He is A LEADER OF MENG. Out over and above that I can see a large office building somewhere past Trafalgar Sq also I can see NELSON! Oh yeah and a grotty fire escape. LUNCH is GRATE usually as I haf all the sammiche shops of Villiers St - THUS:

Snax
Soup Opera
Treats
Bagel Factory
Eat
An Italian restaurant
A curry house
Benjys
Holland and Barrett
Pret
Coffea (I think, I've never been)
McDonalds on the Strand

AND THEN there is all the stuff in Cov Gdn about 5 mins away.

Today I went to SNAX and got a ham and cheese salad baguette NUM, some MATURE CHEDDAR and BURGUNDY CRISPS mmmmmm and to McDonalds for a CREME EGG MCFLURRY. I highly recommend. And we ate this in the nearby park. Blimey, I am considering myself QUITE THE SPOILT compared to you lot.

(you should work for the London Tourist Board starry S)

I work on 6th floor of 8-storey moddern office. I haf a nice big window that overlooks a courtyard. I can see the top half of the European Parliament, including the Caprice des Dieux bit.

Plenty of nice sandwich shops near the office, or I go eat in the Parliament's canteen (I am not a veggie but they do the best veggie food I haf evah tasted). Today I have not had lunch yet tho'!

It's a supermarket. I do not see the outside world for 9 hours, as I use the canteen, which looks out onto a fence and some gravel. Kids from the estate next door occasioally throw stuff at us. I can usually tell if it is raining because the customers are wet. In front of my as I work I can see aisles 3 through 7, and the Food-To-Go counter to my right. Sometimes I go to the chiller and it is chilly. Sometimes I stand by the Food-To-Go counter, whcih is warm. Sometimes I go to the office and do the paperwork on their shit computers. This breaks up the day nicely. Sometimes I get to walk around the shop floor, but this is fraught with danger as people will ask you where things are. If you need to buy food at lunch because the canteen is run by stingy imbeciles you must go in disguise. Even then it takes half your lunch hour and you have to get the receipt signed and even then they think you've stolen it. There are lots of shops nearby but unless my colleague has her car we do not go to them. If we do we do so at high speed, whilst wearing our uniforms and name badges to make us easily identifiable when we run some one over so we will get arrested later on in the day which will be nicer than working. Most usefully there is a Homebase next door so I can buy pot plants on my way home. The Macdonalds is useless to me.

I work on the twelth floor at the northwest corner of Wilshire and Bundy, overlooking the hills and the Getty and Nicole Simpson's old condo. Three miles from the beach and a mile from my house. Los Angeles is hateful so don't move here.

Mein office overlooks Lake Erie. I can't quite see Canada from where I'm at which sucks because I've always wanted to gaze longingly at an exotic foreign land from afar.

In the middle of Irvine, OC suburbia here, but that's the weird joy of UCI for you. Not an industrial estate, hurrah! I have views into a very green park if I so choose.

crumbling sixties campus quite the modern thing in its day. knownhereabouts as THE TOASTRACK cos it looks like one.

it's about a mile away from my house so that's ace. food in the canteen is lousy, and the shops nearby are too, but the Catering Students are always cookin NUM things and leeting me eat them hehehehe.

The location of my office is such that its environs are transformed by the changing of the seasons. The trees are now in full leaf which means that the view of Oxford city centre and the river are now completely obscured. Today it is really warm so we have the door onto the balcony open. We can hear the quacking of the ducks and the other birds singing. The office is quite near a railway bridge where the trains start to slow as they approach Oxford station, so we can hear their brakes and the honking of their horns. The office a fifteen minute walk away from aa pituresque village called North Hinksey, which has a pub with a huge garden called the Fishes, where I have just enjoyed a tasty chicken, bacon and cheese toasted sandwich.

Big scientific/engineering building from the early 70s: no windows. No shops, nowhere to get lunch from except for the Sodhexo cafeteria so I usually don't have lunch.

Also a crumbling sixties campus. Part of it is a listed building despite being as ugly as fuck. From my desk in the Language Learning Centre I have a depressing view through the glass doors of students expressing their enjoyment of the sunshine through the medium of frisbee. Lunch comes from the laughably named 'Euro' coffee bar down the corridor.

I work for University College London (non-Brits: one of UK's top universities) in a 10-storey block just off Tottenham Court Road (central London). The office is spacious, pleasant, always the right temperature. I have a view across our rear parking area into a trendy gym full of fit young people in lycra bouncing around. Tottenham Court Road is full of flash electronics shops. My shopping is: Virgin Megastore (TCR/Oxford Street junction), Gosh (a comic shop) and a discount & remaindered bookstore over the road from the office, once a week each. There are a couple of charity shops within reach of an occasional trip. I resist Berwick Street (perhaps the mecca for second hand music in London), which is in walking distance, because I always spend £100-200 every time I go there and I can't afford that too regularly. Lunch: I usually eat cheese rolls in the office, but pub lunches with pals occasionally (esp. Andrew L's flatmate), and I go to the British Museum one lunchtime most weeks. I'm extremely happy with my workplace.

It seems there are a few of us within reach for lunchtime meets! Perhaps not...