Tonbridge Has Three Places to Rent a Desk - Here's What Each One Actually Offers

Tonbridge now has three real places to rent a desk outside the house, and that's genuinely good news: demand for exactly this kind of space has boomed since the pandemic, as hybrid working became normal and people decided they didn't have to choose between a cramped home office and a daily commute. We looked at Sevenoaks' own options earlier this week - Tonbridge's turn out to be entirely privately run, with no council-operated hub of its own, though the borough council's website does point businesses towards all three.

Castle Lodge occupies a converted building on Castle Street, in Tonbridge's old town near the castle grounds - a genuinely nice spot to spend a working day, and the first of what's now three sites run by DeskRenter Ltd. It offers open-plan coworking desks (available one, two or three days a week), a fixed dedicated desk with a choice of wired or wifi connection, and two private office suites each with space for up to four people. Agreements run on a rolling 30-day basis, with rent, rates, utilities, cleaning and maintenance all included - no long lease, no fit-out costs, just somewhere to turn up and work.

A short walk away, at 28-30 Barden Road, Workstation Tonbridge sits just a few metres from the rear entrance of Tonbridge station. The building is split over two floors, with ten desk spaces across an open-plan coworking area, a private four-desk office, a separate two-desk area and a meeting room. It comes with a kitchen and break-out space, 24/7 access and high-speed broadband, and sits close to the High Street, the park and the river - with a bus stop 60 yards away and secure bike storage opposite. Handy if you commute into London some days and just need a proper desk on the others.

Riverside House, on River Lawn Road, is the odd one out - run by Penhurst Business Centres, not DeskRenter, and about five minutes from the station with direct trains to London Charing Cross and London Bridge in under an hour. Rather than open-plan hot desking, it's built around fully furnished serviced offices ranging from 58 to 473 square feet, for teams of one to ten people, plus a boardroom and virtual office services for businesses that just need a registered address. Reception is staffed Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm, with 24/7 access and security for those who need it - a proper step up for a small business that's outgrown the kitchen table but isn't ready for its own lease.

Two of Tonbridge's three options - Castle Lodge and Workstation Tonbridge - are run by the same private company, DeskRenter, which also runs two further coworking sites over in Tunbridge Wells, while Riverside House is a different private operator again. Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council's own website helpfully lists all three as bookable for a single day or longer, alongside Capital Space and Regus at Kings Hill and The Hive at Kit's Coty, with a note to contact its economic regeneration team for anything further afield. Whoever's behind them, the practical upshot is a genuinely good one: three real, decent options for anyone in Tonbridge who wants to work somewhere other than their kitchen table.

This is what we've found looking into it - if there's another space in Tonbridge we've missed, let us know and we'll add it. Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells are next on our list for the same look - if you run or know of a shared workspace in either, we'd like to hear about it.

Source: Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council, Find office space, Castle Lodge / DeskRenter Ltd and Riverside House / Penhurst Business Centres.