CITY AND SUBURBAN
An atrium over the woks it's the sign of doom foretold by Parkinson the Lawgiver
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
The Royal Bank of Scotland is trying to build itself a swagger new 3,000-seater head office in Edinburgh, on top of the local John Lewis store. Its bankers will thus be enabled to pop down at lunchtime and stock up on lampshades, haberdashery and woks. Coal Pensions Properties, which owns the site, says the bank wants an atrium the size of a football pitch. This would block out the daylight below, and the plans are on hold. Other parties, complains the bank sniffily, do not share its zeal for this landmark development. Me, too. Whatever it does for the Edinburgh skyline, it sets off the danger signal first identified by Parkinson the Law- giver. Organisations which build themselves grand new headquarters, says Parkinson, are on the verge of decline. Lutyens's New Delhi signalled the end of the Indian empire. (`This,' said Clemenceau, 'will be the grandest ruin of them all.') More recent instances have been provided by Lloyd's of London, with its up-ended cucumber frame, by British Airways, with its water gardens, and by Barclays, with its Islamic Cultural Centre in Lombard Street. The fatwah still hangs over Barclays. It now turns out to employ 475 people to deal with the media and cannot make out why it gets such a ter- rible press. Like the French army at Agin- court, it has too many knights, tripping over each other. (Barclays' boardroom has always had too many knights.) How many floors of the cultural centre they occupy, I cannot say, but at the far end of Lombard Street, Lloyds' unreconstructed head office gets by with 678 people, including the chair- man. There is no room for any more, and I wonder why the Royal Bank should need four times as many and an atrium to keep them in.
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