Ye Olde Swiss Cottage in London was gaudy, draughty and built on a traffic island. But it was just the escape I needed
Early in my career, I was going through a difficult chapter in work and life. Having moved down to London from Glasgow, I felt socially untethered, unsure of where I belonged. I yearned to feel part of a gang like I’d done back home, but I had no clue about how to find one.
A bruising experience of redundancy hadn’t helped matters. In desperation, I’d taken a job on a business magazine writing about textile-industry share prices. At the time I barely knew a PE ratio from a wheel of brie. And by the time I left the following year, I still didn’t, for reasons that will become apparent.
Fortunately, the three other young women I joined on the news desk were equally disenchanted. On my first day, a bloke with a basket of sandwiches did the rounds. These were wolfed down at speed, al desko. I’d barely swallowed the last crust when the trio hustled me out of the building. We dashed across north London’s multilane Finchley Road to a faux Swiss chalet plonked in the middle of a roundabout.
This surreal hostelry was Ye Olde Swiss Cottage, a former coaching inn that dates back to the 1830s. Gin and tonics swiftly ordered, my new deskmates filled me in on the office politics – the dos and don’ts, the scurrilous rumours. Evidently non-business chat was strongly discouraged by the glamorous but chilly editor. An anaesthetic was required to get us through long afternoons of pretending to work.
