The office at the end of your street

There is a moment talking to Katy Spelzini, when you realise that Howfen House is not really a business idea. It is a solution to a problem she was living.

"I work late nights because of the industry I'm in," she says. "My husband Roscoe would be trying to get home from Manchester and his train would get cancelled. And I'd be thinking: who's picking up the kids? It was just constant. That pressure, day in, day out."

They are not unusual. Anyone who has spent an hour stationary on the East Lancs, or watched a Northern Rail departure board flicker to 'Cancelled' at 5:47pm on a Tuesday, will know exactly what she means. The grind of commuting into a city to sit at a desk, when a perfectly good desk might exist much closer to home, is a deal that increasing numbers of people are quietly questioning. Katy just decided to do something about it.

Howfen House opens for business on School Street on Monday, 1 June — right at the heart of Westhoughton, next door to Market Street — in a space that was, until recently, a golf simulator. The transformation is striking. Dark walls, warm lighting, comfortable sofas, amber velvet chairs in the boardroom. It feels less like a serviced office and more like somewhere you might actually want to spend a Tuesday.

"There's nowhere to go"

Ask anyone who works from home in Westhoughton where they go when they need to get out of the house, and the answer is usually a shrug, followed by a mention of Wetherspoons. Katy knows the feeling. "There's nowhere else, is there?" she says. "And people going to 'spoons' — it's fine until it gets noisy and you're done."