The history of the office desk reveals much about what has happened to the penpusher and office worker, writes LUCY KELLAWAY.

ON WEDNESDAY, at Bonhams’ salerooms in London, Lord Lucan’s desk will be put up for auction. It is 35 years since Lord Lucan killed his family’s nanny, thinking she was his wife. And 35 years since he vanished, never to be seen again but to be convicted of murder in his absence.

Bonhams is evidently hoping that some of this grisly history will cling to the desk and push the price above the £6,000 (€6,700) estimate. But, as I looked at the pictures of this elegant piece of furniture in the catalogue, another, less lurid story caught my fancy: the history of desks in general.

Lord Lucan’s desk was made about 200 years ago from rosewood and tulipwood. It has a built-in leather blotter surrounded by a marquetry pattern of leaves and flowers. Its legs are curvy and, in the words of the catalogue, are “headed by cabochon and acanthus cast mounts trailing to pierced leaf sabots”.

As it happens, I have recently bought a desk of my own. Mine is made from a slab of medium density fibreboard and is covered in white melamine. Its legs are made from hollowed metal trailing off to plastic plugs. As for the workmanship, I did some of it myself. A machine in an Ikea factory had pre-drilled some holes but had not made them deep enough and so, after much cursing over the screwdriver, I attached the legs so insecurely that the desk sways when touched.

Yet my desk has two advantages over Lord Lucan’s. If you spill coffee on it, you can wipe it up with a dishcloth. And it cost less than 100th of the Bonhams’ estimate – though in terms of beauty or durability may be less good value on a pound-for-pound basis.

What has happened to the office desk over the past few hundred years tells of the fall of the craftsman and the rise of Ikea but it also says much about what has happened to the penpusher and office worker.

The desks of the mid-15th century were legless boxes with sloping lids. The scribe was a common artisan who was not thought deserving of comfort, let alone swank. He had to lug his desk around with him as he scribbled down the words of the clerics.

A couple of hundred years later, fine ladies and gentlemen needed desks to write letters at home. Thus the bureau, the knee-hole desk and the roll-top became fashionable. In my sitting room at home, there is a walnut Queen Anne bureau that I inherited from my grandmother, who must have inherited it from hers. Inside are little pigeon holes and even a secret drawer; the desk has everything one might desire – except for a place to put a computer. And for that reason, I never use it.

The computer is not entirely to blame for the soullessness of the modern desk – it was the birth of large offices that started the trend towards ugliness. At the beginning of the last century, armies of paper pushers took their places at clumpy wooden desks; after the second World War, these were replaced by standard steel ones with drawers down either side, which all fitted together neatly to save space. By then, the wooden desk was obsolete except as a status symbol: senior managers had imposing mahogany ones that stood in the middle of their private offices. But then came the open plan revolution and the walls and the doors came down, leaving the desks looking pretty silly. Some managers clung on to them for a bit: I remember visiting Flemings merchant bank in London a decade or so ago and seeing the shiny mahogany desks of the senior bankers looking crazily adrift in the wide open space.

Now, big desks have gone altogether as they are deemed out of tune with the fake egalitarianism of the modern office. The fashion now is for everyone’s desks to look pretty much the same, the difference in status being reflected in the size of the pay-packet more than the size of the furniture.

The other thoroughly modern trend is for curves. The office desk that I am sitting at while typing this has a bit scooped out of the front. This is in the name of ergonomics. Modern desk designers know that a desk need not look nice – the only thing that matters is that its occupant can be chained to it all day long, staring at the computer with minimal risk of injury.

Edward Holmes Baldcock, who designed Lord Lucan’s desk, gave no thought to ergonomics but that is because he knew his aristocratic customers would not be sitting at it gawping at a screen for hours on end.

My desk might be comfortable but any personal connection with it is long gone. I remember my first desk at primary school. It was wooden, with a built-in seat and an inkwell. The lid lifted up and on its underside all its occupants left their mark. “Lucy loves Oliver,” I scratched into it one idle day.

In the US Senate, many of the old desks have the hand-carved names of previous occupants. But, when I look at my desk now, I feel no desire to deface it as it means nothing to me at all. Whatever happens to the desk in the next 35 years, one thing is for certain.

At Bonhams, the desks of today's infamous office workers will not be going under the hammer. Desk of Fred Goodwin, anyone? Desk of Dick Fuld? – ( Financial Times)