When I went to work in the City, nearly 40 years ago, there was a dispensation on Fridays; staff could wear tweed suits and brown shoes to segue to the weekend. My office was only a few years old and had air conditioning; unusual those days. Unless someone actually fell to the floor with a seizure, it was forbidden to loosen a tie or remove a coat. You can guess where this is going; now only a few banks and Lloyd’s underwriters and brokers have such a strict dress code. My office became in a permanent state of dress-down, with dress-down max on Fridays.
In the old days the City fell silent after about 6.00 in the evenings. There were no hotels, no shops except Asprey and Mappin & Webb (so useful for buying a momento for a departing colleague) and the pubs closed early. The wide range of butchers, cheese mongers, fish mongers and general provisioners in Leadenhall Market have long gone. But they have not gone far. Borough Market is a world famous gastro hot-spot. The former Port of London building in Trinity Square was for many years the HQ for insurance brokers, Willis Faber. It became well known as a location shot in the opening sequence for the television series The Professionals. Now it is a hotel. Many of the architecturally distinguished banking halls in the City live on as restaurants and wine bars.
It is not all shopping, eating and drinking in the City. It has retained its position as a financial centre. Time zone and language are a big help but there is more than that. The UK never protect their domestic businesses. In fact there was a big, everything must go, sale in the 1980s, dubbed Big Bang, sending old school stockbrokers off to manor houses in the Cotswolds with a song on their lips and a fat wallet. Trading floors of futures exchanges have closed and American owned exchanges with electronic trading platforms are based in London. Being outside the eurozone has not been a hindrance. This did not come as a surprise to me as, for many years, my pay was in US dollars converted to sterling at the end of every month and my business, oil, was entirely transacted in US dollars, yet nobody suggested that the UK should abandon sterling for the dollar.
The expansion of the City into Docklands was for me completely unimaginable 40 years ago. After a stuttering start this project has proved a success but if you look around you in Canary Wharf you are surrounded by bland architecture. An opportunity to create something beautiful was wasted. With so much water around, a new Venice of the north could have been built. The City itself for years resisted high-rise expansion. This makes sense when neighbouring Docklands is there for just that purpose. But now, no doubt after many refreshing luncheons, developers have overcome the qualms of the City Corporation and there is a danger that these new buildings will smother the historic architecture of the City. I used to find this depressing until I realised that the old City buildings are here to stay; the new buildings are transitory. My state-of-the-art air conditioned office in Mark Lane has already been replaced by a glass-clad block.
And what of other financial centres, London’s competitors? My US banking correspondent tells me that on Fridays her office closes at 2.00 and she can pack her (monogrammed, natch) beach bag for a weekend at the Hamptons. I wonder if people work on Saturday mornings still in Hong Kong and Singapore?
I checked your website to see if you had written more since my last visit and you have. I particularly liked the telephone one – v reminiscent of my childhood. At one time, when my father was head of the Atomic Energy Authority and Eden was Prime Minister we had a scrambler telephone in rural Essex – very exciting at the time. This replaced Government messengers on green motorcycles with sidecars, who wore goggles and gauntlets – even better as there was something to see (and hear)