It’s 11.57am on an overcast morning. The setting is an 181-year-old cricket ground in south London and the action is absorbing.Seated in the long room of the members’ pavilion at The Oval, the home of Surrey County Cricket Club, amid the hubbub of families gathered around tables and fractious debate on the day’s play, it becomes clear that not everybody here has eyes on the action.One member is pacing left and right, dealing with a crisis at work. Another has several highlighters to hand, going through his preparations before leading a church service tonight.The more you look, the strange juxtaposition of corporate life and cricket’s traditional settings blur into one.This is not an alternate universe. This has become the new norm, as working from home did during the Covid pandemic, for hundreds of Londoners each week who call The Oval their ‘office’.The Athletic’s base for ‘work’ when at The Oval (George Edwards)The decline in attendances across England’s four-day domestic cricket competition, the County Championship, in favour of the short formats of the game — the T20 Blast and The Hundred — has been keenly felt in recent decades.But Surrey have bucked the trend, their County Championship attendances better than any of the 17 other counties, thanks to schemes like ‘work from Oval’, introduced at the beginning of this season.Jason Rice, 59, sits in the pavilion at a table far back from the action, laptop screen open, having just eaten lunch as a break from his work in property. Further down, Tom Barnardo, the 33-year-old church minister, goes through his service for the afternoon.At the back of the JM Finn Stand, insurance advisor Richard Dixon and lecturer Peter Bray have one eye on the cricket and the other on their screens. Walking round The Oval, which will host the second Test between England and New Zealand this week, it is clear it has become a hive for work.