Towery City
THE National Westminster Tower is the tallest branch bank in the country. The Stock Exchange Tower has seven of its floors filled up with computer equipment. The Lloyd's building is terra incognita between its fifth and twelfth floors, but (as on all the floors but the ground floor) it largely consists of a hole in the middle, or atrium. As colder winds whistle round these extravagant architectural ego-trips, their new tenants are having second thoughts. The Stock Exchange will lose the last users of its market floor when the dealers in traded options move out. Chair- man Andrew Hugh Smith and chief execu-
tive Peter Rawlins clearly cannot it to send the computers chasing after the deal- ers, into some new home more suburban than City. Then they can pull down the Tower and develop the site. I do not expect Lord Alexander of Weedon, NatWest's new chairman, to pull down his Tower. His attitude, if I read it correctly, is: If you've got it, flaunt it. He has in the central City more grand buildings than he needs, most of them head offices of banks long since lost in mergers. When National Provincial merged with Westminster, the Tower was built on the Nat Prov's site (sparing its banking hall, by Gibson, 1864, with statues on the roof) but the NatWest's new chiefs were from the Westminster and declined to move in. They preferred to stay put in their own graceful building in Lothbury (by Mewe and Davies, architects of the Ritz). It is still NatWest's head office, though daylight does not reach the chairman's room — and the Tower (by Seifert) just stands there. My bet is that we shall soon see Lord Alexander, in broad daylight, waving genially from the top.
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