17 unexpected places for freelancers to work in London

At this quirky King’s Cross café, there’s loads of space for freelancers among the brightly coloured tables and jazzy hanging lanterns. Grab a coffee and a pastry to work through the day, then stick around in the evening for a glitter lettering workshop or some vagina cupcake decorating. That’s all bases covered, then.

The Wellcome Collection is one of London’s hidden gems, an enormous, totally free museum and library of scientific artefacts and medical paraphernalia for the ‘incurably curious’. If that’s you, its spacious café welcomes hard workers with open arms.

Fancy making Hyde Park your new office? The café side of this uber-cool restaurant – in the Zaha Hadid-designed Serpentine Sackler Gallery – is a workers’ haven away from the toil and trouble of London’s busy (and much less pretty) co-working spaces.

While the man himself might have preferred a quill and ink to a battered MacBook Air, that doesn’t mean you can’t channel his writing spirit in the museum café. The floral courtyard is a welcome breath of fresh air in an otherwise busy part of Bloomsbury.

Free wi-fi for all customers means you can take a seat in the department store’s stylish fifth-floor café and raise a glass of bubbly to celebrate a productive day definitely not spent idly scrolling through your Twitter feed.

The perfect Friday destination for freelancers, this working gin distillery lets you take a pew to fire off some last-minute email chases before treating yourself to a chaser of mother’s ruin. You deserve it.

There are a number of restaurants and cafés at Tate Modern, most with an enviable view of the Thames. Best of them is the bright and airy eighth-floor Granville-Grossman Members Room in the Blavatnik Building (formerly the Switch House). Membership starts at £90 a year, which is a lot less than the cost of renting desk space at a WeWork – and you get access to all the exhibitions too.

If you spend your days praying for unpaid invoices to be resolved, where better to work than in a church? St Nicholas Cole Abbey hosts a midweek service but it’s also home to The Wren Coffee café from Monday to Friday. Aside from its beautiful interior, the space benefits from loads of natural light and top-quality coffee. Amen!

For the money-conscious freelancer, London pubs have to offer that extra something to warrant splashing out on a drink as decadent as a pint or a G&T. How about a pub on a barge? Yep, that’ll do.

This café-cum-bike workshop is a fave destination for Lycra lovers, with cycling events often shown on the big screen. It’s a great spot for freelancers, too, with its peloton decorations and windowside seats for those riding solo. Bonus points if you cycle there too.

This gorgeous museum housed in an old church on the south bank of the Thames is unsurprisingly famed for its gardens. Its Garden Café offers all the tranquillity of an alfresco Zen retreat while also providing cover from the rain.

Want to make the most of your time? There’s no better way to do it than at this Korean restaurant, café and creative space, where you can also get a haircut. The ‘15’ in the name refers to the number of minutes they’ll take to cut your hair, so you can totally squeeze a trim into a screen break.

This foodie-friendly department store has ideal remote-working credentials: take your pick of the spacious gallery and the low-key 3 and 6 Bar. In need of a sugary pick-me-up? The wi-fi here extends to the ice-cream parlour on the first floor. Sweet!

There’s free wi-fi throughout the V&A, so you can hot-desk anywhere, from the stunning National Art Library to the Silver and Ceramics Galleries. One look at the historic main café, with its domed roof and marble columns, and you won’t want to work anywhere else.

Minutes away from Elephant & Castle tube, you’ll find one of London’s loveliest off-West End theatres – but this is a destination for more than just aspiring thespians. In the charming bar there’s free wi-fi, fresh pastries and plenty
of nooks and crannies where you can hide
away for the day.

Perfect for the more creative remote worker, Bermondsey’s Doodle Bar allows (even encourages) you to draw all over the walls when the confines of your laptop screen start to be a little too limiting or you’re stuck staring at the spinning rainbow wheel of doom.

This majestic mansion sits on the south side of Hampstead Heath, housing the historic collections of Hampstead Museum. The café offers a range of locally sourced treats, and is an opulent location for decluttering your inbox.