It is Thursday afternoon in the City of London and there is only one suit to be seen.
Europe’s financial centre, in coronavirus lockdown, is almost deserted. The bankers have disappeared and new tribes with different uniforms have taken over: builders in black trousers with reinforced knees and dusty boots; security guards in high-vis jackets pacing outside empty lobbies; and trim young men and women in Lycra running or cycling through the empty streets.
The one suit — double-breasted, with tie — is Nilesh Nagar, a reinsurance broker, who has popped out of his office near the Lloyd’s Building to post a letter. “It’s spooky,” he says, from a safe distance. “It’s good for coming in,” he adds, although he would prefer fewer builders on his train. “But that’s not really the point.”
The Square Mile is used to a daily human tide. More than half a million people work there, making it perhaps the mostly densely populated business district in Europe during office hours. But with only 9,000 residents it empties out on a Friday night. On weekends, it is quiet with only tourists and some overworked bankers and lawyers still at their desks.
But not this quiet.
“I can’t quite capture the atmosphere,” said Clark Leak-Lyle, a construction consultant out for a stroll. “It is like Christmas but sad.”
“Even on a Sunday it is not as dead as this,” says a security guard opposite the Lloyd’s Building.
Lloyd’s of London, the insurance and reinsurance market, is operating with only a skeleton staff. Its main underwriting floors are closed. But the group’s top executives make a special appearance on Thursday to talk by phone and video link to investors, insurance companies and the media. They sit in the boardroom at least 2 metres apart — a move they said was designed to send a united message about the market’s solvency.
Paternoster Square, next to St Paul’s Cathedral and home to the London Stock Exchange, is completely empty bar one man — mobile phone glued to his ear — and a dozen pigeons.
David Schwimmer, chief executive of the LSE, has not been into the office all week. “Most of our people are working from home,” he said. However, some workers at exchanges have been designated as “essential for on-site work” to ensure that daily operations run smoothly.
It is a similar story across the City.
Asset manager Schroders has moved to what it calls a “minimum viable presence” across its entire business, including its headquarters at London Wall, with 90 per cent of staff working from home.
A trader who works at the top of one of the City’s skyscrapers said he was one of only four in a team of 160 who now comes in to work on his trading floor.
His firm did not ask him to come in but he said his job needs the computer bandwidth and the trading infrastructure that can only be provided in the office. “If I lose an order because of dodgy IT then it would be stressful,” he said, adding: “The coffee machine works, thankfully, as that would have been a deal breaker.”
Restaurants, cafés and wine bars are all shut, as are most takeaway outlets. For the few people still at work, their best hope for lunch is a supermarket sandwich.
One veteran trader said the most important difference between now and the great financial crisis was that back in 2008 City workers could retire to the pub. There are three traditional boozers in sight of his office.
With many financial sector employees working from home — often with surprising effectiveness — some are wondering whether the City will be permanently changed by the coronavirus lockdown.
One chief executive said the biggest problem was staff at home working too hard — staring at a screen from waking to bedtime. “It’s less efficient but it works. You can do 95 per cent just as well.”
David Kynaston, a historian of the City, recalled the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York. “At that point it seemed a very much open question of whether a physical financial services cluster had a future.”
The debate petered out, he added, “but presumably banks will make some assessment of how much productivity suffered with physical dispersal. The conclusion may be ‘not much’. It might have improved.”
Sue Langley, chairman of Gallagher, the insurers, and a City Alderwoman, admitted working practices are bound to change, with fewer people squeezing each day into the Square Mile as they work more regularly from home. But she said face-to-face contact would remain crucial for many: “You can’t build a personal relationship by phone.”
She said human interaction was essential “to the feeling of belonging to an organisation rather than to the kitchen table”.
This is why the City will soon fill up again, she predicted.“ We are all still there in spirit. We haven’t really gone away. We’ll be back.”
Additional reporting by Oliver Ralph
