The Big Bang 30 years on: How the City went from bowler hats and liquid lunches to smartphones and tossed salads
There’s now a whole generation of City workers – and City PM readers – who weren’t even born when the markets were deregulated back in 1986. Standing in Leadenhall Market on a week-day afternoon, they could be forgiven for thinking the City hadn’t changed all that much over the last 30 years. Hundreds of besuited men – and they are mostly men – stand around chugging pints as their forebears have done for centuries.
But even the boozy lunch, one of the last vestiges of the “old” City, is on the decline. Few of us can justify taking three hours to “oil the cogs” of a big deal. And the new generation – those as likely to work at Old Street’s Tech City as they are Bishopsgate – have been shown to drink far less anyway. While the City’s historic architecture and myriad cobbled streets suggest something immutable and timeless, today’s proliferation of salad bars and sky-scrapers would be utterly alien to the bowler-hatted bankers of the post-war period.
Trading tech
As in so many areas of life, the story of the City over the last 30 years is largely a story of technology. The Big Bang coincided with the replacement of the traditional trading floor – those men in funny jackets yelling at each other – with the Exchange Automated Quotation system, a computer-based method of trading that did away with the need for face-to-face (or phone-to-phone) contact. This greatly reduced the cost of trades, as well as ramping up volume exponentially. By ‘87, the LSE was conducting as much business in a month as it did in a year before the new system. Brilliant – at least until the Black Monday crash of ‘87, which was exacerbated by the fact nobody knew how to stop the machines carrying out more trades.
Over the years and decades, the screens became more advanced, moving from the walls of the trading floor to the desks – and eventually pockets – of individual workers, using ever-more complex algorithms to value and execute trades. They’re still not perfect, though – the notorious “flash-crash” of 2010 and the subsequent 2012 crash were both the fault of dodgy software.
Game of Phones
In 1986 the first consumer mobile phone was three years old. Released by Motorola, the DynaTAC 8000X was a real brick, barely small enough to hold in a single hand, offering 30 minutes of talk-time and the ability to store 30 phone numbers. It cost £2,639, and you can bet virtually all of them went to nouveaux riches City-boys. The mobile phone soon became a key tool of the trade, allowing deals to be thrashed out at any time of the day or night.
But there was a sting in the tail: last year, following the Libor scandal and increased scrutiny in the post-crash banking world, many companies banned employees from using mobile phones for work, afraid they might be used to mask nefarious deals. Email and messaging services followed a similar trajectory: in 1886 Motorola introduced the first mainstream numeric pager, followed by increasingly sophisticated devices over the following decade. The BlackBerry Inter@ctive Pager 900 arrived in 1996, paving the way for portable email, not to mention millions of assholes with hip-holsters beeping all the way to Canary Wharf.
Embracing the vulgar
The red-braced City-boy has become a cliché of recent history, but rewind to the late 80s and they were shudderingly real. The 80s were not a time for the shy and retiring: power dressing was in, with ties loud, suits boxy and chalk-stripes as thick as your thumb. Out went the stuffy formality of the post-war days, replaced by an embrace of the vulgar. If you weren’t drinking Dom Perignon in a wine bar wearing an Armani suit, you weren’t anyone.
The decades have seen City fashion rein itself back in, reflecting the more austere fashion of the times: suits have become slimmer, in more subtle shades and fabrics. But some questions are age old. When I wrote a similar feature five years ago, I mentioned the “brown shoes debate” – whether they are acceptable in the City (I said they were). Last month a study came out claiming you’re less likely to get a City job if you wear brown shoes. What do I know?
Pretty soon, the norms of City style may all change again; the new tech-orientated generation are increasingly dressing down; in another 30 years we might all be sporting the Zuckerberg T-shirt and hoodie uniform, wondering what the hell was up with those suits people used to wear.
Food for thought
The last 30 years have seen an explosion in the UK dining scene. In 1986 Britain was the laughing stock of Europe when it came to food, and French cuisine reigned supreme. Today London is one of the world’s foremost dining cities; and even the City – traditionally slow to react to trends – has some top class restaurants, from Jason Atherton’s City Social to Martin Williams’ M Restaurant. And head to Canary Wharf – once a dour, disused theme park come 6pm – and you can eat almost as well as you can in Mayfair.