Playing the Game: The City

In the 1980s, life in the City of London changed. The market floor gave way to the electronic screen; the leisurely lunch was replaced by the designer sandwich; small, privately-owned firms gave way to huge, globally-ambitious banking corporations. Fortunes were made, and the acronym BOBO was coined ('Burnt Out But Opulent'). The Big Bang of 1986, imposed by the Thatcher government on a reluctant City, was a conscious–and successful–attempt to ensure London's future as an international financial centre, deregulating the Stock Exchange and opening its firms up to outside ownership. It was also, like so much of Thatcherism, an attempt to return to the nineteenth century, the pre-1914 world of minimal government interference, unfettered market forces and Dickensian extremes of wealth and poverty, happiness and sorrow.