You need to sit down with the other party in person. They’re in London; you’re in Manchester, Leeds or somewhere further up the M1. Or it’s the other way round. Either way, you’re staring at a calendar invite and a map, and the same awkward question keeps surfacing: who travels the whole way?
It’s a small negotiation that happens before the real conversation even starts. Whoever makes the full journey loses most of a day, arrives a little frazzled, and quietly carries the sense that they gave more ground than the meeting was worth. Do it once and it’s fine. Do it repeatedly — with a client, a partner, a supplier, an acquisition target, a board member — and the imbalance starts to matter.
The cleaner answer is usually to meet in the middle. The trick is choosing a middle that actually works.
In principle, meeting halfway is obviously fair. In practice, the geographic midpoint between two offices is often a motorway services, an unfamiliar town with nowhere credible to sit down, or a city centre where parking is a lottery and the only neutral ground is a noisy hotel lobby.
A genuinely good meeting point needs a few things at once:
Most “halfway” suggestions satisfy one or two of those and fall down on the rest. Peterborough is one of the few places that ticks all four.
Look at a map of England with London at the bottom and the major northern cities at the top, and Peterborough lands neatly in the middle of the country. It’s roughly equidistant from London, Cambridge, the Midlands and the North — which is exactly the spread you’re trying to balance when one team is coming down from the north and the other is heading up from the capital.
Crucially, it’s well connected in both of the ways people travel:
That combination is the point. The party travelling by train and the party travelling by car can both reach the same door without one of them taking a wildly worse journey than the other.
If you want to read more about why the city’s position makes it such a practical base, we go into the strategic case on our flexible Peterborough base page.
There’s also a subtler advantage to meeting in the middle: neutrality.
When you meet at someone’s head office, the venue carries a quiet message about who’s hosting and who’s visiting. For a first meeting with a prospect, a sensitive negotiation, or a conversation between two parties who are meant to be equals, that imbalance is worth avoiding. Neutral ground keeps the focus on the agenda rather than the postcode.
This is something we hear from members who use Native Space precisely because of where it is. As Ethar Alali, a Native Space member, puts it: “It’s in a very convenient location for our other sites, nice and central… the team are very helpful. Highly recommend it.” When your contacts are scattered across the country, “nice and central” stops being a nicety and becomes the whole reason the meeting happens at all.
A good meeting point is only half the battle. Once everyone arrives, you need a room that lets you get on with it.
Native Space sits at Unit 12, Bourges View, Maskew Avenue, Peterborough, PE1 2FG — about a mile from Peterborough railway station, just off the A1, with free on-site parking. So whichever way your guests travel, the last stretch is simple: no circling for a space, no long walk from the station.
Inside, it’s a fully serviced, established professional environment, not a borrowed corner of a café. For meetings, that means:
The people who already work here give a sense of the tone: regulated care providers, care consultancies, counselling practices and software firms such as ManageSpace UK. It’s a calm, credible setting to bring a client or partner into.
And if these halfway meetings become a regular fixture, it can make sense to formalise the arrangement — a professional business address, a private office, or a podcast and media studio if you’re recording as well as meeting. You can use Native Space as much or as little as the relationship requires.
If you keep finding yourself negotiating who travels the whole way, the fix is rarely to travel more graciously — it’s to change where you meet. A central, well-connected, neutral venue turns a logistical tug-of-war into a non-issue, and quietly signals that you respect everyone’s time.
Native Space is built for exactly that kind of use: meeting rooms available to book when you need them, and flexible options if “the halfway place” becomes a habit. Costs are tailored to how you actually use the space, so the simplest next step is a quick conversation.
Book a 15-minute call and we’ll talk it through — what your meeting needs, how often, and which room fits. You can also reach us via our contact page or by phone on 01733 913867. Wherever your people are coming from, we’ll help you meet them in the middle.
