Writing in 1901, the financial journalist and author Charles Duguid mused that the physical expansion of the London Stock Exchange over the course of the nineteenth century – from James Peacock's original basilical building to Thomas Allason's mid-century glass-domed structure to the construction in the 1880s of John Jenkins Cole's massive eastern addition – provided a concrete, physical measure of the institution's growing economic importance. ‘Even as the architecture of a nation is an index of its character,’ he wrote, ‘that of the Stock Exchange is intimately related to its history of never-ceasing growth. Structural extension has always been going on in all directions; it is going on now at its centenary and presumably always will be going on.’ As a result of its piecemeal evolution, the building, he added, was more akin to ‘some monument of the Middle Ages’ than ‘a modern building. The shape of the Stock Exchange is shapeless.’ (Duguid 1901: 308–9)

Figure 18.1 John Jenkins Cole, ‘The Stock Exchange – Plan of Markets’, February 1880.

Held in the London Metropolitan Archives (Guildhall Library), John Jenkins Cole's 1880 colour-coded floor plan of the soon-to-be expanded stock exchange (Figure 18.1) corroborates Duguid's assessment. The irregularly shaped trading floor of the stock exchange is divided into large, flat areas of contrasting colour, each representing a different market – or ‘walk’, to use local parlance. Coloured in a light yellow, the important consol market, where British government bonds were traded, is located right by the main entrance of the building. On the opposite side of the trading hall, in pink, is the large foreign market, where those dealing in foreign government bonds and shares of international joint-stock companies gathered. Other major players included the blue-coloured railway market, labelled ‘Caledonian, Great Northern Ec.’, and the gold-coloured American market on the north side of the building. Synonymous with the modern financial industry and British global dominance, the exchange is oddly lopsided and, moreover, completely devoid of a proper façade.

The ownership of stocks, bonds and other financial assets remained highly concentrated during the latter half of the nineteenth century. More precisely, according to Ranald Michie's estimates, the percentage of Britons who owned securities rose from about 0.8% in 1870 to 2.2% in 1913 (Michie 1999: 72). Considering that most men and women had no savings whatsoever, these numbers are hardly surprising. Among the wealthy elite who did have savings, however, financial assets proved increasingly popular. By 1912–13, financial assets represented 64% of the total assets owned by British people, outpacing traditional investments in land and real estate (Michie 1999: 71). Simultaneously, the nominal value of securities listed on the London Stock Exchange skyrocketed from £2.3 billion in 1873 to £11.3 billion in 1913 – more than the total value of securities listed on the Paris Bourse and New York Stock Exchange combined (Cassis 2006: 98). Movements of the London equity market had profound, often global, economic consequences. Britain was not only the ‘workshop of the world’, as the saying goes, but also its ‘clearinghouse’ (Ingham 1984: 40).

And, yet, for most Britons, including those who personally owned investments, the building where daily trading happened was a complete and utter mystery. Not only were ordinary members of the public strictly forbidden access but journalists were also excluded. Not surprisingly, visual representations of the building, interior views especially, are exceedingly rare. Owing partly to the rules and regulations that governed access to the marketplace and, partly, as we will see, to the design of the building itself, the London Stock Exchange played an astonishingly trivial role in how the public came to conceptualize the reality and promise of making money out of money. However well known or, depending on one's perspective, notorious, the stock exchange failed to conjure a mental image, apart, perhaps, from that of the Royal Exchange, the city's commodities exchange, with which the now no longer extant building is still routinely confused today.

Produced in preparation for the building of the stock exchange's large eastern addition, inaugurated roughly five years later, on 9 January 1885, Cole's floor plan is thus an exceedingly rare and atypical document. Compared to the handful of interior views produced for market outsiders, not to mention the more conventional ticker-tape ribbons and stock lists, the drawing provides an unusually clear sense of the concrete, physical premises where London's famed bulls and bears met to do business. It reminds us of how the buying and selling of credit took place in what was, after all, a real, bona fide marketplace. Indeed, as historical sociologist Alex Preda (2009) explains, the enclosure of the stock exchange in a specially designated, purposefully built space at the start of the century was key to the establishment of the financial market as something more than a series of disparate commercial exchanges. Combined with its formal reorganization as a members-only subscription room in 1801, the relocation of the stock exchange to Peacock's Capel Court building greatly enhanced the financial market's legitimacy in the public eye. In fact, as architectural historian Amy Thomas sees it, the London Stock Exchange was founded on a ‘spatial contradiction’: its existence as an ostensibly open, free and fair market was dependent upon the ‘institutional confinement’ of buying and selling activities (Thomas 2012: 1009).

This chapter draws attention to the various visual and material mechanisms by which this institutional confinement of the stock exchange was achieved. Foreshadowing the blinding reflection cast by the skyscrapers that house financial institutions today or, alternatively, the buildings’ wilful inconspicuousness, these mechanisms worked not simply to confine but also to obscure and confound. Look closely at Cole's drawing and contemporaneous descriptions of the building and the daily events that took place there, and it soon becomes clear how the immateriality, unfathomableness and ‘metaphysical extraterritoriality’ of finance was achieved through the deployment of images and objects strategically designed, like the black boxes of today's computer-driven financial world, to create the illusion of an immaterial, geometric space of frictionless transactions. Drinkall (Chapter 19) engages directly with the opacity of contemporary financial architecture and its entanglement with new forms of predatory lending.

That the City's financiers were more attuned to events taking place in Mexico, New Zealand, Japan or Canada than the Midlands was already a well-worn cliché by the time Cole took on the role of architect to the London Stock Exchange in 1855. On the eve of the First World War, British investments abroad reached £4 billion – approximately 30% of the country's total wealth (Matthews et al. 1982: 128–9). ‘Never before or since has one nation committed so much of its national income and savings to funding capital formation abroad or derived so much of its income from overseas assets’ (Edelstein 1982: 3). Still, managers and members of the stock exchange resolve to not have a public presence in the City, and their general aniconism or opposition to visual representation was exceedingly singular. The shapeless unfathomableness of the stock exchange rested on a unique economy of visibility and violence, strategically devised to obfuscate both the marketplace's existence as a bona fide lived space and financiers’ embeddedness within and responsibility toward the larger social order. As Styve (Chapter 21) shows, the lightness with which British finance found opportunities in South Africa's emerging mining industry is inextricably entangled with the weighty scars borne by bodies and landscapes exposed to extractive operations.

A man goes behind a curtain

London's heyday as a global financial capital lasted for roughly a century, from the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 to the end of the First World War. The first brokers and jobbers who gathered in James Peacock's approximately 4,000 square-foot, basilical building off Capel Court dealt primarily in government bonds. With the development of railway, mining, steamship and colonial markets in the first half of the nineteenth century and attendant increase in the number of brokers and dealers frequenting the stock exchange, the building soon became uncomfortably crowded. Rather than relocate elsewhere, the owners of the stock exchange elected to demolish and rebuild. Inaugurated in March 1854, Allason's stock exchange building was roughly double the size of the original building. As the total number, variety and value of financial assets traded on the stock exchange continued to grow, however, so too did the number of members. The expansion of the foreign market, where securities issued by foreign governments and international joint-stock companies were traded, was the main culprit this time. Responding to the attendant increase in members, managers progressively added on to Allason's original building, further accentuating its asymmetrical, haphazard appearance.

Supervised by Cole, these extensions – a new entrance here, a new settlement room there, an eastward extension, a westward extension, followed by another – improved operations on the trading floor, but only for a time. Witnesses’ testimonies to the Royal Commission on the London Stock Exchange held in 1877–78 paint an evocative picture of the overcrowded, noisy atmosphere: ‘There is barely sufficient room now. If we had anything like another 100 members we should be obliged to add to the accommodation,’ William Frederic Perowne, the secretary to the managers of the stock exchange, observed (London Stock Exchange Commission. Report of the Commissioners 1878: 18). Indeed, in the year before the opening of the new eastern addition, the square footage per person with right of admittance, including not only subscription-paying members but also over 1,400 clerks, was down to a meagre 2.08 – an area smaller than most aeroplane bathrooms (Michie 1999: 77). It's worth noting, however, that the entire membership of the stock exchange was seldom if ever present in the building at the same time. And, while space was unquestionably scarce, Perowne's and others' similar accounts, stressing the insufficiency of the exchange's accommodations, were not entirely unmotivated.

Prompted by a series of scandals involving foreign loans, the Commission made several recommendations to the British government – all of them ignored, whether out of fear of upsetting the City's powerful financial aristocracy or genuine commitment to self-regulation. Among the commissioners’ ill-fated recommendations was, most notably, the proposal that the public be admitted to the Exchange. The final report didn't insist too much on this point, simply noting that ‘if it were possible, it would be desirable that the Exchange should be opened to the public’ (London Stock Exchange Commission. Report of the Commissioners 1878: 9). The commissioners leading the proceedings, however, made very little effort to hide their position on the matter. Wouldn't it be much better ‘if the Stock Exchange were open like any other market is?’ asked the chairman, for example (London Stock Exchange Commission. Report of the Commissioners 1878: 340). Was it not true that, as a result of its strict no-visitors rule, the average investor frequently wondered whether the whole thing was nothing but a sham – ‘a man goes behind a curtain, as it were, pretends to do something, comes back, and announces what he has done?’ asked another commissioner (London Stock Exchange Commission. Report of the Commissioners 1878: 346). In response to these and other similar suggestions, those questioned by the Commission invariably offered some version of the following as part of their answer: while perhaps desirable in theory, allowing members of the public into the stock exchange to see for themselves what went on there was impossible in practice. The building was simply too small. Investors would gain little to nothing from being there, while gawkers would simply get in the way.

Drafted in the interim period between the closure of the Royal Commission in 1878 and the start of construction on the stock exchange's eastern addition, Cole's plan lends credence to market insiders’ descriptions of the trading floor. Demarcated with ‘curved and perforated lines as if to highlight their flux and instability’, the markets directly abut one another (Thomas 2012: 1027). Leaving no area uncoloured – every square foot, square inch of the trading floor is claimed – the design reinforces the idea that the existing building was simply too crowded to accommodate outsiders.

The size and spatial organization of the markets within the stock exchange was a matter of primary concern for members of the exchange. Developments in one market could easily affect prices in another; members needed to see and hear what was going on around them. ‘Our markets move as it were by electricity,’ as G. W. Medley, a dealer in American securities, put it (London Stock Exchange Commission. Report of the Commissioners 1878: 340). This was not, however, the type of information that normally appeared in architectural floor plans. The presentation is also highly unusual. For example, while colour per se was not uncommon, most architects used it to differentiate materials: carmine for brick walls, Prussian blue for stonework, Indian-yellow for wood floors and so on. In short, keeping his clients' needs and concerns foremost in mind, Cole produced a drawing that is a highly didactic, stylized diagram more reminiscent, in the end, of a map than a standard floor plan.

As diagrammatic representations of space, maps and architectural plans are closely related to one another. In fact, the two types of images share a common historical origin. Still, when compared to other floor plans, the extent to which the architect's diagram conveys an abstract, geometric and, moreover, cartographic understanding of markets at the expense of other, more social ones is striking. Take, for instance, the following eighteenth-century plan of the Royal Exchange (Figure 18.2). ‘Shewing the Several Walks or Places of Resort Usually Frequented by the Different Merchants, Traders etc. Of this Great Metropolis’, this early precedent reveals how, in the second half of the eighteenth century, trade at the commodities market continued to be organized geographically. Save for a few exceptions, walks are identified by traders’ ethnicity (e.g. Italian) or country of origin (e.g. Portugal). Commodities, in other words, had not yet become independent of individuals who produced and transported them, as would later happen, according to Karl Marx, once they became fetishized. At the stock exchange, conversely, the relationships between things – the idea of things, even – took clear precedence over relationships among people.

Figure 18.2 Thomas Hope (Publisher), ‘A Plan of the Royal Exchange of London Shewing the several Walks, or Places of Resport, usually frequented by the different Merchants, Traders & c. of this great Metropolis’, 1760.

Naming conventions aren't the only difference worthy of note. Unlike the plan of the Royal Exchange, Cole's plan aims to convey a sense of markets’ relative sizes. In fact, using the scale as reference, one could ostensibly calculate and compare the total area occupied by each walk. Contrary to brokers, whose presence at the stock exchange varied daily depending on their clients’ orders, jobbers, who worked as independent dealers, typically spent the entire day at the stock exchange and were known to get quite territorial if someone tried to usurp their usual spot on the trading floor. Still, it's hard to imagine Cole surveying the trading floor in order to create a perfectly proportioned, measured drawing of the markets. Even on the busiest of trading days, it would have been impossible to determine the exact spot where one market began and another ended. More than simply suggest that there was no room left to spare on the trading floor, the flat, contiguous areas of colour separated by dotted lines give the impression that markets existed independently of the brokers and jobbers who congregated there. Conceived as taking place within an abstract, cartographic space, their behaviours and actions come across not as constitutive of the market but as passive expressions of naturalized, external market forces.

The map-like characteristics of Cole's floor plan, including the watercolour hues and dotted boundary lines, would have been immediately resonant to the trustees, managers, and regular members of the stock exchange. Besides the time-series plots that charted the ups and downs of share prices, maps were unquestionably the most ubiquitous visual tool of nineteenth-century finance capital. A constant fixture in the stock exchange's reading room and brokerage firm lobbies, they also appeared in prospectuses and illustrated press articles, chronicling the triumph of this or that overseas business venture. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the London Stock Exchange was one of the places where Britain's formal and informal empires most explicitly intersected. And cartography was their shared visual idiom.

Maps not only represented but also facilitated and gave added legitimacy to the extension of Britain's political and economic control of new parts of Africa, Asia and the Pacific. By reducing complex topographical, not to mention political, social and economic, conditions to an organized system of symbols and place names, maps enhanced Britons’ sense of control over the landscape and its inhabitants. What is more, maps’ simplified design trained Britons to envision overseas territories as blank canvases awaiting European economic development. Indeed, while originally principally agricultural, industrial and commercial in nature, Britain's overseas economic interests were increasingly determined, during the latter part of the nineteenth century, by financial flows from the City. And, aside from more or less ornate share certificates, maps were frequently investors’ sole means of visualizing the often yet-to-be realized enterprises in which they had invested their savings. Maps played an essential role, in other words, in cultivating Britons’ ability to simultaneously see into the distance and into the future – that is, to literally speculate.

One might say, then, that it's especially fitting and not a little ironic that Cole's floor plan would resemble a map. Like the maps showing the progress of railway construction, telegraph lines, sea routes or the location of extant and future mines, the floor plan's design encouraged members of the stock exchange to think of space in temporal terms – as distances that needed to be breached, this time by sound, sight and human steps – and to envision the future. Indeed, as already noted, Cole's plan was likely drafted in anticipation of the construction of the massive eastern addition, known as the ‘New House’. It would not be long before members would have to relocate to a new temporary building for the duration of the renovations and then redistribute themselves again across the New and Old houses. And, as we know from its reproduction in an 1884 pamphlet, Cole's floor plan was to serve a key role in members’ parcelling up of the new, extended trading floor (Thomas 2012: 1027). Its purpose, in other words, was largely prospective.

The architect's map-like treatment of the trading floor, not to mention the drawing's uncanny resemblance to the African content, would likely have stimulated members to envision the marketplace as a terra nullius, ¹ ripe for economic exploitation and colonization. Considering the timing of these decisions, the approach of members of the ‘Sub-Committee formed to confer on the arrangements of the Market on the opening of the Eastern addition’ would, in fact, have directly paralleled that of world leaders, who gathered a few months later at the Berlin Conference to parcel up the African continent. ²

A building refuses to speak

Like the original 1801–2 building it replaced, the one Cole depicted in his floor plan was notoriously plain and inconspicuous. Sandwiched between two buildings owned by the Alliance Assurance Company, the court leading to the London Stock Exchange was no more than twenty feet wide – just enough space for a small entrance (Figure 18.3). In fact, as the The Builder explained to its readers, no proper elevation drawing of the building could be produced, for ‘in no proper sense is there an exterior elevation, the suite being an area inclosed [sic] by other buildings’ (“An Account of the London Stock Exchange” 1854: 49). In direct opposition to architectural ideals of the time, which dictated that a building's form and ornamentation should clearly communicate its function, the building was essentially façade-less; it categorically refused to speak.

Figure 18.3 Engraving of the London Stock Exchange, Capel Court, from George Walter Thornbury's Old and New London, etc. (1878)

At first glance, it would appear that the construction of the large, domed eastern addition and attendant alterations to the original building, including an extension of its street frontage, were designed to transform the London Stock Exchange from a shabby marketplace into a veritable ‘monument’ (Thomas 2012: 1010). In reality, however, these changes had very little impact on outsiders’ experience of the stock exchange. Given the financial district's notoriously narrow streets, it's unlikely, for example, that anyone walking in the immediate vicinity would have been able to see Cole's dome. What is more, while technically part and parcel of the stock exchange, the sections of the building now lining Throgmorton and Old Broad streets were given over to offices. Their vaguely Italianate, trabeated façades made them indistinguishable from other buildings in the neighbourhood. Compared, however, to the retreating plainness and anonymity that has become the hallmark of modern financial skyscrapers such as 200 West Street, the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, the London Stock Exchange's efforts to conceal itself were much more aggressive – violent, even.

Refusing the godly commonwealth

Looking at the global financial industry today, anthropologists Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee draw attention to how, ‘lacking any sensible qualities’, market phenomena such as interest and exchange rate volatility wreak a special kind of havoc on the lives of individuals living in the Global South (LiPuma and Lee 2004: 28). The way these market phenomena undermine individuals’ freedom and material welfare is concrete and measurable, and yet appears to most ordinary observers to come out of nowhere. The ‘abstract symbolic violence’ of the contemporary global financial system differs fundamentally, they insist, ‘from the economically motivated violence of the past, such as colonialism, in that it does not involve the inscription of new spatial relations, the subversion of local indigenous property arrangements, forcible resource extraction, or the conscription of labour. Space is no longer the raw material of international violence, in that the violence of finance is so far-removed and remote from the spaces of everyday life and the sovereignty of the states that it profoundly affects’ (LiPuma and Lee 2004: 27–28). (See also Chapter 16 by Nir on the relationship between ‘abstract’ finance and violence.)

The history of the London Stock Exchange challenges LiPuma and Lee's distinctions between colonialism and the abstract, deterritorialized and symbolic violence of financial markets. Financial investments and other forms of gentlemanly capitalism were major drivers of imperial expansion. Moreover, in the case of the stock exchange at least, violence was not simply a side-effect of financialization; it was inherent to how the marketplace operated. Abstract symbolic violence, to borrow the anthropologists’ phrase, was accompanied by acts of physical violence on the trading floor. Non-members who had the misfortune of entering the stock exchange were subjected to jeers and physical intimidation. Younger members, especially, were known to surround intruders and press themselves against them, smash in their hats and finally jostle them from one end of the room to the other until they were ‘liberated’ by one of the porters, who then expelled them from the premises. Members did not reserve violent, schoolboy pranks for intruders only. Rough play aimed at cultivating group cohesion was a central part of stock exchange culture. On at least one occasion, the ‘injuries resulting from rough play in the House’ sustained by a member were so severe that he was unable any longer to earn a living as a dealer (London Metropolitan Archives 1888). Taking advantage of the invisibility afforded by the stock exchange building, members knowingly engaged in behaviour deemed unbecoming of well-to-do British men. What bound them together was not only economic self-interest but also shame, social pressure and the unwavering sense that, within the confines of the stock exchange, members were free to write their own rules. The everyday, aggressively laddish behaviour of stock exchange members at once reflected and refracted, all the while officially disavowing, the violence associated with the forcible extraction of labour, land and resources overseas.

Being the most public form of art, architecture, not surprisingly, played an important role in British industrialists’, merchants’ and financiers’ efforts to convince others of the well-foundedness of Adam Smith and other liberal thinkers’ view that commercial activities contributed to the ‘public good’. The fact that the public could walk into the Bank of England or Royal Exchange and see at first hand how credit and commerce were spatially ordered helped to legitimize these institutions’ activities and their positions within the broader social order. Yet the leadership of the London Stock Exchange, as we've seen, took a radically different approach. Designed to enhance the illusion of open and free commercial exchange, the stock exchange was founded on traders’ repeated, often violent, refusal to acknowledge their participation in the ‘godly commonwealth’. ³ More than simply document its irregular, shapeless form, Cole's representation of the building spoke to financiers’ uncharacteristically asocial – anti-social, even – understanding of the economy and their role within it.