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A new dating website, lunchdateLondon.com, pairs off people working near to each other who want to find romance but don't have much spare time and need to be back at their desks within an hour or so.
Marketing consultant Brett Harding, who set up the site, believes that matching people by their job location helps to ease first-date jitters and can help overcome the traditional British reserve.
"We based our search engine on where you work. It's totally different to anything else that is out there," Harding told Reuters.
"They could be working within 500 metres of where you are and yet you never had the guts to talk to them."
His advice? Keep the first date short and sweet.
"If you click, great," he said. "But if you don't, you can down your panini and say your goodbyes."
Harding, who boasts over 2,000 profiles on the site after running an advertising flyer campaign outside London subway stations, wants to export his site to New York, Chicago and Sydney.
He says using the work-based approach to finding romance bridges the chasm between speed dating and normal dating.
"Speed dating is three minutes and mentally exhausting as you circle the room and talk to people. Conventional dating is time intensive and you do invest an awful lot in it," he said.
"You know if the chemistry is there in minutes. If you go out at lunchtime you have the perfect get-out clause - I've got to get back to the office."
Critics may accuse Harding of knocking romance on the head - and Harding agrees that his approach is more practical than romantic.
"But what is romantic about getting slaughtered in a nightclub and not being able to hear a word they say. In the daytime it's safer for women and it is cheaper than a full evening date," he said.
The site managed to pair off 50 couples in the first nine weeks after it was set up with happy customers proving to be best way of spreading the news.
"I find that word of mouth is worth 100 advertising campaigns. This is fantastic for the busy professional who knows what they want," Harding said.
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