According to David Landes, the economics historian, one of the reasons the Industrial Revolution happened first in Britain was that employers in our medieval cities were able to reduce costs by using cheap homeworkers in the suburbs.

This gave British manufacturers an edge over their continental rivals (who were hampered by medieval red tape) and hastened the introduction of the factory system (which, of course, then put the homeworkers out of a job).

According to O2, the mobile phone company, it is happening again. Thousands of small businesses are abandoning their City offices and reducing costs by using cheap homeworkers in the suburbs. In part, this is the continuation of a trend that has seen more people work from home for lifestyle reasons. On some estimates, the number of people working from home in Britain has doubled in the past ten years.

But a survey by O2 suggests that there has been an additional surge in companies scrapping their offices in favour of homeworking since the onset of the credit crisis last year. Most said that they had made the move because of costs.

The overheads associated with running an office have been rising sharply, putting pressure on small business owners worried about an economic slowdown. For staff, the cost of commuting has also soared.

Almost half of Britain's four million small businesses are already run from home, according to the website Enterprise Nation, and the figure is forecast to rise to 60 per cent this year.

In the O2 survey, owners of two thirds of the companies still working from business premises said they were considering giving them up within a year.

More than half of the companies that had scrapped their offices said that new technologies, such as wireless internet and mobile broadband, meant that they no longer needed a dedicated business base. Sceptics might point out that existing technology would allow most office workers to operate from home, but only a tiny proportion actually do.

This may be because workers value the human contact. Or it may be because employers are worried about productivity. Before he became London Mayor, Boris Johnson described working from home as “a euphemism for sloth, apathy, staring out of the window and random surfing of the internet”. Which may be why O2 is so keen on it.

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