by Mary Bogan
While the City of London Corporation was making public its dissension to current DLR plans, 3 miles eastwards at Limehouse Studios on the Isle of Dogs, the London Docklands Development Corporation was fighting hard to win the propaganda war over the future of Canary Wharf.
Over 100 representatives from London’s major financial institutions attended “The Growing City” conference this week; part of the LDDC’s sustained campaign to establish Docklands as the logical home for the biggest and best in global banking.
Opening the conference, Lord Young announced the launch of the Docklands Local Collaborative Project, a training scheme funded by the Government in conjunction with local employers and educational bodies. Lord Young told his audience of potential employers that the scheme would give them the support needed to develop a skilled workforce in Docklands and also that help would be available to all companies in the area, large and small.
From the governor of the Bank of England, though, there were no real words of encouragement for Canary Wharf. Robin Leigh-Pemberton reaffirmed his belief that the City certainly had to grow, but fragmentation should be kept to the minimum.
Physical cohesiveness, he said, had been a vital ingredient in London’s success as a financial centre. Deals were struck not just on the basis of facts but also on the trust built into working relationships.
Some extension to the City was needed, but Mr Leigh-Pemberton said that there would be space available around the City’s fringes, whether across the Thames at London Bridge City, or to the north when the Bank has its own clearing centre, or to the west in Fleet Street.
Michael von Clemm, the ex-chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston and now chairman of Merrill Lynch Capital Markets, strongly rejected the idea that interaction between City institutions is a prerequisite for transacting business in today’s financial markets.
As conglomerates grew in size and brought together people from different functions with different expertise, the task would be not to interact with those outside but to ensure that an institution’s own employees interacted effectively and communicated well with each other. This, together with the expectation that banks will become 24-hour-a-day trading operations with three shifts, put extraordinary demands on the sort of building banks needed. According to Mr Von Clemm, those demands can be met most easily and cheaply in Docklands.
However, Mr Von Clemm also said that Canary Wharf could not proceed without an extension of the Docklands Light Railway to Bank. Transport and meeting people’s changing needs were the keys to Canary Wharf’s success.
