Seasonal fluctuations
NEW from City and Suburban this year is a selection of useful and acceptable gifts. (I prefer this 'genteel phrase to the Financial Times's nouveau-riche heading, 'How to spend it.') Hurry to the Bank of England's gift shop in Bartholemew Lane, by the door of the museum. It offers handsome, old- fashioned and more or less Bank-shaped tins, which, when you take the lid off the Bank, show that it is full of chocolate biscuits. Other boxes take the form of the Bank's great bronze doors, which swing open to reveal stacks of gold ingots — though they, too, are chocolate inside. These evidences of the Bank's soft centre are supplied by one of its more enterprising directors, Sir Hector Laing, chairman of United Biscuits. The growing band of exiles from London EC, augmented this week by the Evening Standard, would welcome the Fleet Street Memorial Print, an enterprise of the Copperplate Press (37 Bury Street, London SW1), engraved after the ward map of Farringdon Without in Noorthouck's 1772 History of London. The investment bankers have paid unheard-of prices to set themselves up in Fleet Street, and the newspaper barons, like the stockbroker barons, have taken the money and run. Even the FT could not refuse the equivalent of £73 a square foot. The industrial slums beyond the famous façades, all Queen Anne front and Mary Ann behind, are being gutted and rebuilt and wired for sound, at even greater cost — and now, suddenly, investment banking has started to lose its charm and money, and to drive out exiles of its own.... The newspaper exiles nurse the hope that, next Christmas, they will be back.
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