Before and after the Bang

25 October 1986

My friend the stockjobber closed his book, turned his back on his pitch, and walked with me off the Stock Exchange floor, down Throgmorton Street and into Bill Bentley’s fish house. We raised our glasses of Montrachet to the last of the good old days. On Monday he must quit the floor and settle down at his work-station, one of hundreds in a huge carpeted financial factory arranged, like all smart City factories, round an atrium. A deputy will man his pitch, empowered to deal on a modest scale, but not, like my friend, to make or lose on his own book a million pounds in a day. The big deals will come upstairs, to be made over the telephone and the screen, from atrium to atrium. Already, he says, the floor is a place of the past: ‘There’s no atmosphere here any more.’

The talk is all of the weekend’s dress rehearsal (‘If we’re going to deal wearing suits, we may as well practise wearing suits’) for Big Bang Day.