ABSTRACT
When monetarist economics in the early 1980s provoked a cull of manufacturing industry, Britain’s future was said to lie in the provision of services. At one level this meant financial services – banking, insurance, mortgages, investment management, pensions, stockbroking. Even such desk-based activities as these leave an archaeological record: the profusion of 1960s office tower blocks in London, the largely anonymous blocks of Croydon and Romford that mark the growing middle-class interest in financial planning of the 1970s, the prestigious buildings to which financial companies were proud to put their names in new towns like Telford. Ancient traditions ensured the continued presence of financial concerns in Scotland and the construction of prestigious company headquarters in towns, like Halifax and Leek, long linked with financial services. Archaeological evidence of change in the financial services industry could be seen all over Britain in the late 1990s. Bank buildings in many small towns, some in a pompous Baroque or even a Gothic style, had been abandoned by their former owners and put to other uses. On the sites of brickworks south of Peterborough, and on a former colliery site at Wath in Yorkshire, developers were offering new building suitable for use as telephone call centres.
