Google UK: white walls, free food, nice people

I have had the delightful experience of visiting the piston-less, wire-less, valve-less, transistor-less headquarters of Google UK.

Yes, I’ve been right inside www.google.co.uk. And it is a quite extraordinary experience, verging on cultish. But very benign.

My natural instincts are to be suspicious of large influential organisations. However, Google does not feel suspicious. It is very white. The walls are white, the canteen is white, the crockery is white, the food (of exceptionally high quality and free to every employee) is colourful and delicious.

But the people working there are from every conceivable ethnicity and country in the world. I did not see anybody who even began to approach my own age echelon. Indeed, I think the oldest man I saw might have been 42.

I was there to talk about the changes in the media. It was a daunting challenge because, of course, one knew one was speaking to people who knew far more about new media than I will ever know.

But in a funny sort of way, they were charmed by the primitivity of “life on the road” that I was able to describe. And I think, judging from the considerable reaction I’ve had on email from my new-found friends at Google, they were themselves surprised at the unbelievable pace of change in the last 30 years.