Let’s step back to a different time. Imagine an enormous room, capped by a vast dome. At 100 feet in height and 70 feet in diameter it was said to be of a kind with the basilicas of St Peter’s in Rome and St Paul’s in London. This was the great trading room of the London Stock Exchange, known as the Old House. A blue-mottled marble faced its walls and pillars and the wags called it ‘Gorgonzola Hall’ after the cheese. There was not much furniture, just a few rickety shelves, and throughout the hall, ramshackle chalkboards covered in figures. Each firm of jobbers occupied a particular spot on the Exchange floor, where the chalkboards marked their ‘pitch’, while the brokers spent market hours in their ‘boxes’ at the edge of the floor. Business stayed in the family, and these pitches and boxes were often passed from father to son. Women were not allowed even to set foot on the floor of the House. During trading hours as many as 3,000 people jostled under the dome, manning these pitches or circulating through the crowds. Images show men in dark suits and ties, white shirts, hatless, in an attitude of ease, standing in groups, chatting or strolling.

There were games. One etching shows young jobbers, wearing proto-hipster beards and frock coats, competing to throw a roll of ticker tape over a bar fixed high up in the dome. And there were pranks. Whatever the weather, every self-respecting member of the Exchange would come to work with bowler hat and rolled umbrella. On a rainy day it was entertaining to unfurl a brolly, fill it with a confetti of shredded paper and roll it back up again. There were nicknames as sophisticated as the japes: one man was named the Chicken, another the Lighthouse because he was ‘always moving his head around and it reminded people of the light flashing on the top of a lighthouse’. Then there was ‘the Tortoise … he was a little bit round-shouldered, he always wore a bowler hat, brown suit, carried his umbrella and his nose would remind anybody that he was a tortoise.