What dystopian hellhole is this? Welcome to the British office | Peter Fleming

Austerity and underinvestment have given us offices that are cold, ugly and miserable. It's time for a change

The most depressing office environment I have ever witnessed was in a large London bank. Having passed through so many levels of security that Fort Knox would have been envious, I finally reached the nerve centre of the organisation. Open plan. Rows upon rows of forlorn faces. A dull, putrid green decor that was, perhaps, briefly fashionable in 1986. But only briefly. It was rumoured that some staff facing each other had never exchanged words. Studying the suicide-grey workstations, I could kind of understand why. The sad lament in the 1999 film Office Space summed it up: "We don't have a lot of time on this Earth. We weren't meant to spend it this way!"

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