Canaries sometimes sing
DO CANARIES lay china eggs? Hens sometimes find these artificial objects in- troduced into their nesting-boxes to give them the idea. Canary Wharf, that huge dockside battery, has found the birds a little shy. Even its prize exhibit, Merrill Lynch, cannot be expected to come on lay for another three years — if then. Now china eggs seem to be appearing, once a week, in the Times. First its readers were told that Barclays would or might well move its head office into the Wharf. Everything is possible, but I will bet a Barclaycard to a button against it. Many of Barclays' head office jobs are already being moved to a new site in Coventry, and as for the others, the chairman has been heard to complain that his temporary office in the Mint, though miles in from the Wharf, is too far out of the City. The next week's egg was Ogilvy & Mather, the advertising agents. I understand its nesting-box has not yet begun to be built, so that the agreement, not surprisingly, contains many caveats. Let me now fore- cast the next china egg, a true blockbuster. The Government is pitching to make Lon- don the home of the new European Bank for Reconstruction and Development — so why not suggest that it is coming to the Wharf, thus proving that Eastern Europe begins at the Greenwich meridian? Cluck.
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