Popping-in?

Our studio is filled with light and music.
There are multiple meeting rooms, a well stocked kitchen, and an indoor garden (with fishpond). Talk to us about access needs, environmental factors and any accommodations we might make to enhance your visit. Pop-in for tea and stay to use a spare desk for as long as you need.

11 Greenwich Centre Business Park,
53 Norman Road, Greenwich
London SE10 9QF

Cog is a Certified B Corporation

Public transport

We’re next to Greenwich train and DLR station. We have a door right on the concourse but it’s different to our postal address.
what3words.com/hungry.means.author

From Greenwich rail platform

This video shows the route to take from the train that will arrive at Greenwich rail station from London Bridge. There's a gentle slope next to the staircase.

From Greenwich DLR station

This video shows the route to take from the DLR that will arrive at Greenwich DLR station from Bank. There's a lift at the platform level if that's useful.

By car

If you have to come by car, we have a couple of parking spaces. We have a charging point that you are welcome to use if you have an electric car. Call ahead and we'll make sure the spaces are free. Use our postcode (SE10 9QF) to guide you in.

Get in touch

We’d love to hear from you. Use whichever medium works best for you.

11 Greenwich Centre Business Park,
53 Norman Road, Greenwich
London SE10 9QF

Cog is a Certified B Corporation

New project enquiry

It's exciting to chat about potential new projects. We don't have a ‘sales’ team or a form to fill in. Call us or give us a little detail via email and we'll get straight back to you.

enquiry@cogdesign.com

Website support

If you're a client then you'll be best served by calling us or contacting us via ClickUp, otherwise you can use this dedicated email that reaches all of the digital team.

digital@cogdesign.com

Finance questions

This email hits the inboxes of the people who deal with our bookkeeping and finances.

accounts@cogdesign.com

Just want a chat?

Sometimes enquiries don't fall neatly under a heading, do they?

hello@cogdesign.com

Cultural Calendar

A round-up of recommendations and reviews, sent on the first Friday of each month, topped-off with a commissioned image from a talented new illustrator. Sign-up and tell your friends.

Sign me up Cultural Calendar

Cog News

An irregular update of activity from our studio. Showing off about great new projects, announcements, job opportunities, that sort of thing. Sign-up and tell your friends.

Sign me up Cog News

The Commitments

The Commitments

I’ve never sat in such an excited theatre audience. This is probably what all jukebox musicals’ audiences are like but I wouldn’t know because I’ve avoided ever going to one before.

It’s my own fault, I just had very different expectations. I loved the Alan Parker film and I adored the trilogy of books that The Commitments was part of. Roddy Doyle could do no wrong in my eyes.

I’ve got a lot of time for director Jamie Lloyd. He’s done great things at Trafalgar Studios; I really enjoyed his Macbeth (despite the lukewarm reviews).

So I thought that this show would be a writ-large recreation of Doyle’s atmospheric, funny, heart-warming, heartbreaking microcosms of life. Instead, this was like a race to whip through the story, fit in the songs and get to the clap-along feel-good finale.

The staging is wonderfully clever, perfectly capturing the rain-soaked concrete blocks of Dublin and the various sticky-floored venues that the band plays in. But it’s never a good sign when the set is the star, is it?

The show is frantically paced from the beginning, fast cut like a soap opera. It moves so fast that they seem to forget to tell the story.

My displeasure was definitely not shared with the rest of the crowd. The woman next to me starting jigging in her seat from the opening scene; she was fit to burst by the time she recognised the tapping intro of “Try a Little Tenderness”.
michael@cogdesign.com

The story of a rag-tag group of acquaintances bringing Detroit soul to Dublin is a beautifully clever one, comically treated but layered with class-struggles, sectarianism and generational divides. It’s a political exposition with songs and gags. None of that comes through, there’s no warmth or depth (or shallowness) to the characters and the gags are missed as actors rush between set pieces. Even the door-slamming one-line interviews with prospective band members is ham-fisted in its execution.

My big problem is that you just don’t get a chance to understand the characters, everyone is ‘acting’ so hard and projecting their lines so clearly (in the tradition of a musical) that all the slight and shade and interplay is lost.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter, maybe that’s not what this show was ever going to be about. It is certainly very difficult to portray people who can’t play their instruments when the audience is appreciatively clapping every little skit.

My displeasure was definitely not shared with the rest of the crowd. The woman next to me starting jigging in her seat from the opening scene (a Depeche Mode covers band, playing in the window of a launderette); she was fit to burst by the time she recognised the tapping intro of “Try a Little Tenderness”.

At the end of the story the band has broken up and the characters should be on their way back to their dead-end factory jobs. But this is the glitzy West End so instead we were ‘treated’ to a full-on white dinner-suited reprise of another three hits. The cast seemed to revel in it, the audience loved it, I clapped along but couldn’t wait to get out.

This was a jukebox musical; I really don’t like jukebox musicals.