Palaces W ell done, P & 0, which has finally found
a taker for its last head office but one — a handsome modern black ten- storey affair, epicentral (as such buildings are) to a permanent tornado. Grand head offices are a drug on today's market. Would you like an imperial palace on Millbank? Then choose between ICI (£50 million or near offer) and the Crown Agents — try them with £14 million and they'll express-clear the cheque. A Mayfair town house? BTR bought Crewe House along with Thomas Tilling, talked of get- ting £50 million for it, but might take half that. Sir Patrick Meaney moved on from Tilling to Rank, and at once planned to sell its starlet-haunted base in South Street — with its marbled hall, Odeon corridors and surviving traces of the old regime's taste in white carpets. The present fashion in head offices was set by Lord Weinstock at GEC, and conspicuously followed by BTR and Hanson Trust — offices ostentatiously small, and plain, and populated by number- crunchers. Only the big banks keep the old ways. When the For Sale signs go up in Poultry and Lothbury and Lombard Street, we can bet that the fashion is about to change back.
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