Tell us about Spaces
Spaces was born out of a need to create something that wasn’t already there. When I was working my way up through the hospitality industry, I used to love doing pop-ups and supper clubs, but I found the logistical side of nailing one was really difficult, and this was often in the communication. For example, you’d turn up and they wouldn’t have all the equipment they said they had on the phone, or the extraction wasn’t working, or there was no parking – there were often so many details that seemed to be an oversight. I helped a lot of friends with their pop-ups and I used to think that if there was a system that could help fix these things then people could do more of them and grow their businesses.
How does it work?
It’s a list of venues across London that are available for people’s prep, event or workshop needs. We’ve been shouting about it for a few months on Instagram and we’ve already had hundreds of venues get in touch with us, so we’ve got a really good database of venues already. It’s not like Airbnb but it is more of a listing; a venue logs on and lists all of its amenities, puts up a floor plan up, shows pictures of the space and provides details of its general availability so it’s pretty detailed in terms of the information that we provide. We send each party a pack on how to communicate with each other and it’s then up to the venue to get back to people with their availability.
It seems like good timing for something such as this…
The market has changed a lot over the past few years. In the hospitality industry we’ve seen a lot of people leave but then out of lockdown we have also seen a lot of small food ventures pop up. Suddenly, people who were at sous chef level are wanting to go off and do their own thing. There’s a lot of those people who are gagging to find somewhere to put their residency in or to go and sell their food from so Spaces is meeting the needs of a whole new group of people. Also, because of the pandemic and people still working from home [and a lack of staff] there are pub kitchens that are empty a lot of the time and restaurants that close Sunday to Wednesday, so it is beneficial to businesses to be able to hire out their spaces when they are not in use.
Is it just a London thing?
For now, we’re starting off with most of the venues being in London because that’s where we are based but, as it grows, we’ll look to get places from all over the UK on the site so that if you’re sat in your house in London, you can find somewhere in York, or Bristol or Brighton to set up in. By the end of the year, we hope to have something with a more UK-wide appeal.
Countertalk is four years old – how has it evolved?
I started it in May 2018 as an Instagram page when working as a chef to shout about the industry and give it recognition. Out of that grew a really good community of people who wanted the same thing in that they were looking to work at places that treated them well and to be happy in those jobs. I’m a massive believer that there are really good jobs in hospitality but there are also some really bad ones and if you end up in a bad one you might leave the industry for good. Countertalk is all about shouting about the positive jobs and the good places to work and trying to change that culture a bit more, because hospitality is an amazing industry.
Where do you see it four years from now?
We really want Spaces to grow into Europe. I would love a time where you could be in England and virtually plan a pop-up in Copenhagen, for example, from your laptop. But doing that takes way more investment because we would need to grow the team. At the moment there are just the six of us so in terms of tech and team we would need to grow a lot. But we’re hoping to expand over the next couple of years.