Steve Doswell makes some incongruous connections.

I crossed a square, spotted a marquee with promotional staff handing out leaflets to passers-by, and felt faintly miffed that a pop-up franchise had encroached on precious public space – yet more of the free realm sequestered by commerce. Then I told myself to look around and, above all, look up. And there rising high were the towers of Canary Wharf, that great hyper-colony of commerce in the heart of the Docklands. It was a public square but hardly an ancient common from some arcadian idyll. But if the example I’d chosen was incongruous, the underlying point remained the same. There is a need for unstructured, unmediated, unregulated ‘space’... OK that’s simply naïve when standing in the crosshairs of one of the great global commercial centres. But to find some space where commercial messaging isn’t cominatcha from all sides isn’t merely welcome but surely a necessity.

Such space can be found in motorway rest areas in some countries – take France or Slovenia. They offer a place to park, toilets, water, enough greenery for a brief leg-stretch and that’s it. No shops, no cafes, no pop-up promotions. If you want those, there are plenty of service areas as well. In the UK, we have plenty of the latter (and of better quality than in the past) but no rest areas. Pity.

Free space is also important in the workplace. Again, that may seem incongruous for businesses where every square foot of space represents a cost and has to earn its keep. But if we want creativity and the free flow of ideas, we need to allow the people who produce these, a space away from routine pressure, where they can relax. We know that an unstressed mind is more capable of abstraction, of thinking in longer time horizons, of making disparate connections. By contrast, the stressed mind is too busy trying to survive in the here and now of fight or flight or even freezing with fear if the stress reaches paralysing levels. That free space is important.

I thought of this when visiting a large employer’s premises recently. A room simply furnished with a few funky chairs and tables and a plasma TV was used occasionally by staff during lunch or other breaks. They would read, eat their sandwiches, make the odd call or simply sit and contemplate. It was a room for downtime, no more or less, and the fact that it was there reflected well, I thought, on an enlightened employer. However, there was talk of a project team taking it over, “Because it wasn’t being used for anything useful.” Meeting rooms are in demand and frequently hard to find at short notice, so I understood the dilemma. Still, it would be a pity if staff could no longer make use of that room.

Steve Doswell is chief executive of IoIC. Find him on Twitter @stevedoswell and @ioicnews