Last September, I went walking in the Scottish Highlands with a good friend. My friend and I were booked on different flights leaving Edinburgh airport for London on Sunday evening. My friend then had a connecting flight at Heathrow to Hong Kong and then on to Sydney, so he was particularly eager not to miss his flight. Therefore, I dropped him off at the airport terminal before I went looking for a petrol station to refuel the rental car before returning it to the airport and checking in for my own flight.
The “Where the expletive is the nearest petrol station” dance before returning a rental car to an airport car rental office is one I know well, but this one wasn’t too bad. After driving a few kilometres down the M9 I saw a station on the other side of the road, so I exited the motorway at the next junction, crossed the bridge across the motorway, and found…
Well, I found myself myself in a new and better world, actually. It was an office park, but not just any office park. There was a big sign with an RBS logo, lots of gleaming buildings, water features (both active and passive), corporate sculpture, and the general sense of the intense self-regard held by the people who had had this place built. Clearly, RBS had decided that it needed a new, gleaming head office from which to run its überimportant global operations, and had had this Dr No like compound built near Edinburgh airport, where its highly sophisticated heart could beat, without any interruption or disturbance from reality. RBS’s dedicated motorway junction made it easy for these great bankers to come and go to and from wherever their business now was. I am sure there were also fancy gyms, day care centres, cafes and Lord knows what in the complex.
Having worked in international finance myself, this kind of arrangement is not that unheard of, particularly for banks that are big fish in whichever smaller pond that they originate from. I can think of one or two Spanish banks that have even more Dr No-like headquarters on the outskirts of Madrid. Usually the offices of the same organisations in major financial centres are much more normal – RBS has its London offices in a rather boring but shiny block near Liverpool Street Station.
However, to enter such a complex in Madrid, one faces barbed wire fences, metal detectors, ID checks, men in overly fancy uniforms, and probably finger prints and Iris scans. In Scotland on a Sunday afternoon I was able to drive into the complex by accident, and get lost in the private roads between the fancy new buildings. There were a few security guards around, and I suspect that if I had got out of my car and walked near any of the buildings I may have been challenged, but driving around for a few minutes led to little interest. Eventually I found the entrance ramp to the motorway, which was on the other side of the complex to the exit, so it seemed it was not possible to use the RBS offices to turn around without driving through the private office park. I then refuelled my car and drove back to Edinburgh airport.
However, that of Micklethwait’s laws that says that any company that builds a new and ultra-fancy office is doomed, whereas an important company that is still operating out of grimy offices in Basingstoke is probably okay very manifestly holds, I think.
I see. That’s why the entire finance industry hold on on new construction, expansion and renovations – all because of Mr.Micklethwait. Now I know whom to blame.
Think up something contrary to that darned law, quick – the architects and designers are starving!
I think I should say now that I got this law from Professor C. Northcote Parkinson of far greater fame, he of Parkinson’s Law: work expands …
As I remember it, he told of how the decline of the British Empire can be fairly precisely dated from the moment when its headquarters moved out of a rented hotel room and into a custom built and of course far grander office.
In our own time, see also: the Home Office.
And note also how, not that long ago, Britain’s Members of Parliament moved from their former and absurdly cramped not to say squalid conditions in and around the House of Commons into their brand new custom-built palace across the road, on top of Westminster Tube Station. Portullis House, I think it’s called, with what look like huge chimneys on the top, presumably to get rid of all the hot air. I bet if you drew a graph of their expenses there would be a definite kink upwards when they all moved in there.
I agree; a bank’s prospects are inversely proportional to the opulence of its lobby and the size of the boardroom table. Most bank CEOs are enamored of such palaces, apparently oblivious to the possibility that we mere customers are aware that the cost comes out of our pockets. Around these parts we refer to this as an “edifice complex”.
Oh, there are, there are.
Christopher Fildes, formerly of the Telegraph and Spectator commented on the RBS palace several times at some length when it was built and accurately predicted the bank’s downfall, quoting Parkinson.
There’s a largeish building in Glasgow’s Anderston district now occupied by Abbey which, at the time of construction in the mid-’80s, was said to be the most expensive office building per square foot ever built in Britain. Only phases one and two were actually completed before its owner was swallowed by a competitor. It was – briefly – the headquarters of Britoil.
The market for nice office space is so cyclical and developers who have spent a lot of money building it take a bath so frequently and predictably that any company that has its offices custom built has obviously lost control of its costs. Any sensible company will make do with what it can scrape together when the market is up, and wait until a building (or part of a building) that is suitable comes available due to the developer taking a bath and the receivers being desperate for tenants. At that point a long term lease at a very good rate should be negotiated, and the company should take advantage of the fact that somebody else paid for construction of the offices. For instance, very nice offices at Canary Wharf can be leased cheaply at the moment, including those that were built for both Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.
If Abbey occupies such a building, it may be that parent company Santander is smart. I am still trying to figure the Spanish banks out, personally. I was kind of sad that Abbey in London left their old address of 221 Baker Street, which is an address I would never give up if it were mine.
Although RBS has screwed up totally I’m not sure that the new building is relevant in this case.
The centre of Edinburgh is one large World Heritage Site and there are few opportunities to build any of those boring Liverpool Street-style office blocks. Certainly not for the 3,000-odd staff who were previously scattered throughout the city. And I read the other day that the RBS HQ was built on time and on budget. How unlike the Scottish Parliament.
Interestingly, the nearby large and financially successful Edinburgh Park office development was built under Councillor George Kerevan, the then Labour planning boss. Successful! Labour? Kerevan has since switched to the SNP and is currently their prospective candidate for Edinburgh East. Now associate editor of the Scotsman, Kerevan recently told me that these days he considers himself to be a “Hayekian anarchist”. ..
Here are some photos taken at today’s RBS AGM. Note that Fred the Shred now appears to be working for the Sun.
Brian’s point about parliament is very important. The opening of Portcullis House marks pretty clearly the point at which opposition and backbench MPs became entirely superfluous to the legislative process. Contemporaneously their compensation increased sharply, and parliamentary hours were made ‘family-friendly’ so that it became more of a job, with less contact with the outside world during the daytime.
When MPs had power, the administration made their exercising it as difficult as possible.
Cf. the magnificence of the facilities available to MEPs.
(On banks: in retrospect I should have panicked when KSF moved significan business units from Singer and Friedman’s ancient discreet fortress on the wrong side of Bishopsgate, to a shiny-shiny contemporary-art-garlanded glass frontage on Regent’s Street.)
How dare you, Sir! That Micklethwaite law is actually one of Parkinson’s! ;))
Please do not use “kilometers” in any more postings. In Britain we use miles.
Hmmm. You don’t like metric… Quick now, how much energy does it take to raise a quart of water one degree F at STP? What is it’s volume?
The equivalent in metric is trivial, which is why engineering students learn to absolutely *loath* the measuring system based on some long dead king’s anatomy and the horrendous conversions between things.
I will stick with metric, thank you.
Dale: some day I’ll write a taxonomy of difference of opinion between engineers and architects. Your comment will feature prominently.
John: I will use whatever system of units I damn well please. And as a libertarian I will simultaneously defend to the death your right to use bizarre medieval units.
Now just give me a moment while I go and change into my asbestos underwear.
Dale Amon asked:
Isn’t that one-quarter BTU? 🙂 Although it depends on whether US or Imperial quarts are being used….
What I’ve never understood is why carpeting in the US is sold by the square yard, when nobody measures their rooms that way.
Back in my maintenance engineering days, I got into a light-hearted but heated debate about units, particularly miles vs. kilometers, with a New Zealander engineer. At one point he went into a long tirade about how kilometers are so much more logical and how everything should be metric, so then I said, “How tall are you?”
and before he could catch himself he said, “Six foot two”. 🙂
I’m a metric user generally, but it’s funny how some archaic units cling on- particularly miles, and imperial measurements for vital statistics. I know I appreciate a 34D, but haven’t a clue what that is in centimeters wihout a calculator, and somehow it loses its charm when converted to 86.36D 🙂
David: Was RBS actually harmed by having its 3000 Edinburgh employees scattered all over town? I do appreciate that finding a single site for that many employees is going to be more difficult in a smaller city like Edinburgh than it might be in somewhere like London or New York, but putting everyone together in purpose built offices does quite possibly lead to a more insular outlook, and sometimes a lack of appreciation that there are alternatives to the company culture. Plus there is sometimes a sense of invulnerability that comes from it – the idea that the company is more permanent and less fragile than is the case in reality.
I am not making much claim as to what it cause and effect here, and the building of such offices may be of interest more because of what it says about the management mentality and the state of the corporate culture rather than the actual cost.
To be fair to RBS, if they really did have 3000 employees scattered all over Edinburgh (a city in which it isn’t all that easy to get around), having them all in one facility could be more efficient.
Back to the more important topic, I hate metric. I’ll stick with my “long dead king’s anatomy”, thank you, instead of system based on the mis-measured distance from Paris to the North Pole. At least there’s a human orientation to it. (And it wasn’t devised by the French!)
Give it a rest guys. Metric is good for some applications, while imperial is good for others. And like it or not, the French did have their uses throughout history. The world is not B&W. Well, it is some times, but not often.
Can’t see it in the comments above, so will mention that ABN Amro had just moved into a huge new HQ prior to their contested takeover. It was known to be folly (perhaps a folly) at the time.
Dale:
You are more than welcome to use metric units for rocket science if it helps, but for everyday measurements I don’t see any reason to adopt the faux rationality of the French revolution.
Michael:
I said “please” don’t use kilometers, politeness costs nothing. It is a fact that in Britain we still use the mile as our unit of road measurement. All road signs and speed limits are in miles. I heard one of the G20 crusties on the radio (a medical student he claimed!) saying to the reporter that his hospital was “about a kilometer down the road”. That was enough to tell me he was a cock. Think on.
Up in this part of the world (the homestead of the followers of Deornoth), signs have been posted telling us the Town Centre is 4 ‘mins’ away. Exactly how far that is remains unclear, but doubtless the Council know more about these things that mere serfs like the taxpaying public.
David: Was RBS actually harmed by having its 3000 Edinburgh employees scattered all over town?
I’m not sure about that. Perhaps not.
Interestingly, when the recent revelations about Goodwin’s over-the-top corporate spending on wallpaper and suchlike emerged it turned out that Mr Big himself operated from a traditional office in the city centre, not out in the sticks beside the airport. Similarly, Fred’s house is in a nice traditional area of stone-built houses (near to writers JK Rowling, Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith) and not out in a 20th century executive-style suburb. He was right on both of those choices if nothing else.
Metric Karaoke: – sing with me!
91.4 – 61 – 91.4
What a winning hand!
Yeah she’s a Brick House
She’s mighty mighty
At lettin’ it all hang out
(Doesn’t sound quite the same, does it?)
Congrats to you Brits for rejecting metrification! They’d have forced you to drive on the right, next! And then to adopt the Euro!
We Australians have metrics, but imperial units are also randomly used in everyday conversations.
As a matter of fact, a lot of imperial measures can be derived from units that recur around the world, at least according to the interesting book ‘Civilisation One’.
Dale Amon, is it true that the moon moves at a speed of exactly 1 kilometre a sec? Isn’t that worth knowing?
It is of course one of C. Northcote Parkinson’s laws (see “Parkinson’s Law: Or the Pursuit of Progress” 1957 – get the edition with the 1985 introduction by Prince Philip if you do can).
The most famous example of the “law” is the defeat of British Satellite Broadcasting (operating out of vast impressive offices in London) by Sky (operating out of few ex R.A.F. huts out in the country).
I believe the fancy offices were sold to another company after British Satellite Broadcasting went bust (sorry “merged with Sky”) – and the company that took over the offices went bust as well.