I’m standing near a patch of waste ground, black London mud spattered with pieces of rubble and thick wiring, plus some digging equipment and bits of scaffolding. The mud is reminding me what came before. I’m revisiting the past. My own. This is 33 King William Street, in the heart of the City and only hundred yards or so from London Bridge and it’s where my (mercifully short) career in the financial services industry began. When I arrived in London, No. 33 was occupied by SG Warburg, the now-defunct old City of London investment bank, located in a strange mishmash of a building that was part mid 80s Dr No with a plastic and glass frontage (perhaps hiding a swimming pool and missile silo), part boring glass office block. That particular building – taken straight from a brochure of similar assembly line powder puff pseudo modernist compromises that seemed to thrive in the mid to late 1980s) lasted less than thirty years.
No. 33’s life began when the street was laid out in a straight line in the 1830s, cutting through and dissecting the small, winding ancient lanes. I can’t stop walking around this (temporary) waste ground. It’s as if the overlays of memory are being recalibrated in front of us, but usually we are rushing around too much to notice. But if you can find somewhere like this, with some personal history connected to place, perhaps in the process of transition, than an archaeology of atmosphere can take place. Sadly, my recollection of the Warburg weeks is pretty hazy. There’s a hole in my memory and a big hole in the ground. I hope this doesn’t mean that things I’ve forgotten will start to disappear in the physical world).
At no. 33 I had only been in London for three days when I found myself in charge of a huge medieval style rotating metal rack dep in the bowels of the Warburg offices. My job was simply to put/throw the individual cardboard client folders at high speed – yet efficiently and accurately - into the rack in the right place while on its rotation, as my co-workers, various pretty, flirty, well-built, blonde cockney princesses - especially two friends who had both managed to effortlessly look like a young, very curvaceous, Cybill Shepherd - looked on and commented on the action. If I flagged in my efforts and started to slow down, these extrovert Cybillian Amazons would attempt keep my spirits up with banter, gossip and lashings of innuendo. Did they have boyfriends? I was too intimidated to enquire.