CITY AND SUBURBAN
Goodbye to the Throgmorton Street club I can't wait to knock it down
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Ihave few ambitions left in the City, but I was there when the Queen opened the Stock Exchange and I want to be there when she shuts it. She and I could take turns with the jack-hammers. Not long to wait now. The Exchange has plucked up the courage to turn itself from a club into a company, and the first thing that any board with any sense will do is to climb down from its otiose tower and sell its island site on Throgmorton Street. When I came to the City the Exchange dwelt in marble halls. Barbarously, it demolished them, opting to dwell in contemporary con- crete, built around a modern trading floor. It need never have bothered. The modem trad- ing floor was a contradiction in terms. Big Bang overtook the Exchange, shares were traded on electronic screens, and the brokers and jobbers moved off the floor, never to return. Dusty and empty, it has resisted all attempts to relaunch it as a cafe or a dolphi- narium. Technology, we can now see, had broken the Exchange's grip on its own mar- ket. So long as stocks and shares were exchanged by traders on a floor, and so long as the Exchange owned the only floor in town, its monopoly was absolute — but it could not possibly aspire to own the only screen in town, or the only system. For a long time it kept itself busy with substitution activities, making fussier club rules, and pushing the Cadbury code of corporate gov- ernance down companies' throats, though its own governance was nothing to write home about. Now it will give up rule-making. Clubs can be run for their members but companies have to put customers first or go out of business. This company no longer needs its concrete clubhouse. No one will miss it and it must be worth more dead than alive. Down with it. After you, Ma'am.
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