Watch out Covent Garden, there’s a new kid in town

21 Curtain Road has been Creature London’s home for over a decade, since the beginning, in fact, since there were just 6 of us bouncing around in here. More than ten years later, 6 became 60 and despite welcoming these smart, creative and brilliant people to the Creature team, we’ve still singularly failed to explain to people how to come in through the beautifully designed and welcoming front door rather than the back where you are greeted by the loos; thankfully they are nice loos.

Curtain Road has seen many things - if these walls could talk… Well, honestly, it would probably be a bit dull for anyone that’s not us: lots of stories of really smart people working hard to make great work and having a lot of fun at the same time. A decade of interesting meetings, including the one that ended rather abruptly when the clients said they just couldn’t imagine their CEO ever setting foot in Shoreditch; the one that ended rather more gradually, when the CMO took a call five minutes in, wandered out of the room, and never came back; and, of course, all the ones that weren’t total fucking disasters, of which there were, thankfully, a fair few. And loads of in-jokes that probably didn’t even make sense at the time.

Which is why this isn’t going to be one of those nostalgia posts - no sepia tones, no rose-tinted glasses, and no tears. Because yes, while Shoreditch is where we not only founded a company in the literal sense but where we founded Creature’s mission to make work real people can’t help but care about and our ambition to leave the industry better than we found it, these things exist beyond bricks and mortar. So, this move isn’t about what we’re leaving behind, it’s about where we’re going, and how incredibly sodding exciting it is that we are. So, yes, while it would be easy to get a bit sentimental (moi?), I’m not going to, because that would be boring. And nothing about today is boring.

When we announced that Creature was being acquired by Candid, we said that it was right because it was the beginning of something, not the end of something – and our new home is the start of that. Just like in 2011, when 6 of us decided to move into an office big enough for ten times that number, Macklin Street is unapologetically about ambition, about growing Creature, welcoming new offices in new markets, and creating that global hub.

Because while it is 100% true that an agency isn’t a building, it’s a group of people, there’s no world in which the building - even in a 3:2 world - isn’t a hugely important part of the story, and the building we’re moving to marks the beginning of a fuck-yeah new chapter for us. No longer the ‘scruffy little fuckers’ in Shoreditch, we’re going to be the ‘slightly less scruffy little fuckers’ (we’re never going to totally abandon the scruffiness - it’s fairly baked into the brand by this point) in Covent Garden.

Our new office is a frankly gorgeous new space that is terrifyingly close to the layout that Ben and I messed around with in keynote 6 months ago, and that has been brilliantly brought to life by some genuinely brilliant people. And yes, it’s brilliant. Intelligent misbehaviour writ large, in a space (YES, I SAID SPACE) that is unquestionably Creature, but Creature in a slightly shinier, slightly less grubby box with its own coffee bar. (Gibbo insisted).

And yes, we’re nearer Theatreland, and yes, we’re nearer the 10 Cases, and yes, we’re nearer the Coach & Horses, but those things are all entirely coincidental and serendipitous, because if you think I’m the sort of CEO who makes business decisions based on proximity to stage musicals, and a good pint of Guinness, and a great steak frites, then you have woefully underestimated me. I’m also very excited about cycling over Waterloo Bridge every day. So there.

Dan Cullen-Shute