Boom, Bust and Bankers review – a harrowing tale of two Cities

In a world in which finding facts and making sense of things seems increasingly akin to trying to assemble a jet engine made of sand in a hurricane, it is a great comfort to be presented, every now and then, with the intangible rendered tangible. We often labour unsuccessfully to resolve a visual representation of issues and systems into words. Metaphors made flesh make life easier to understand.

Broadgate is a metaphor made flesh, bricks and mortar. The subject of Channel 4’s Boom, Bust and Bankers documentary, this is the 13-hectare (32-acre) office and retail estate near Liverpool Street station that is dominated by the fifth tallest building in London, the 164m (538ft) Broadgate Tower.

The site came into being in 1985, complete with what were effectively defensive walls – it was known as “the Ring of Steel” – to keep the people of the deprived parts of the city immediately to the north and east out while the men (and, y’know, it really was just men) inside got on with mastering the new universe Thatcher created with the free-market revolution. They warmed themselves at the bonfire of regulations she ignited, while outside it got colder and colder.

The show neatly mapped out a short history of finance from then to now. I don’t know if you have heard, but it did not work out well. A lot of people got rich and then even richer when, as Geraint Anderson, a former member of their ranks, put it, they realised “there was no downside to being reckless”. At least until 2008, when the entire banking system teetered on the brink of collapse – with Lehman Brothers tumbling into the abyss, Morgan Stanley losing 80% of its market value and many other stories causing the share price of tiny violin manufacturers to rocket. Fortunately, a full reckoning was averted by the injection of billions upon billions of pounds of taxpayer cash. Everything went back to more or less normal. Footage from the time, showing Peter Mandelson slithering tight-lipped into his car as a reporter asked why he, as business secretary, couldn’t stop bankers having bonuses, summed up the whole event quite well.

Alongside this succinct summary of how things work at the top ran an equally concise encapsulation of how they work at the bottom. Literally, as the programme went down into the basement of Broadgate to interview some of its cleaners, security personnel and other unseen workers who make sure the lives of those higher up run smoothly. José Tandazo, originally from Ecuador, gets up at 4am to start cleaning and is back home at 11.30pm. This is the best place he has been, he says, “but I do miss being outside”. Luis Valencia earns the London living wage of £10.50 an hour but it turns out that £355 a week after tax is not all that liveable on, and he and his father (who has two jobs, the first of which is an 11-hour shift at Victoria station) live together to make ends meet. In their spare time (I don’t know, I don’t know) they join protests outside places that do not even meet the living wage; here, Thomas Cook, which says it outsources to Accelerate. Accelerate declined to comment.

And there was Barry Smith, a former trade union rep who was made redundant from the railway job he loved by privatisation and is now a security guard – another forcibly broken link in the chain that once connected the powerless to the powerful.

Interspersed with these stories was the tale of Broadgate’s regeneration and the millions of pounds being spent on its transformation from financiers’ fortress to what its overseer, David Lockyer, is keen we envisage as a modern capitalist community utopia. To this end, he is having the ring of steel dismantled and replaced by buzzwords and an “enlivenment programme” to encourage a mix of tenants and dilute the suits that once formed its rental mainstay.

I imagine Lockyer also envisaged a useful bit of promotion in return for granting Channel 4 its access-all-areas pass. But the makers outmanoeuvred him with their delicate blending of stories, with all their wordless contrasts (the absolute guff talked by PRs about the “mindfulness” of their new project versus the human language coming out of everyone else), invisible connections (the geopolitical crises that created profits for the people upstairs who bet the right way, but destroyed the lives of many who were forced to emigrate as a result and now work beneath them), and silent testimony to the growing inequities between the haves and have nots. Class, capitalism, power and privilege all playing out in the microcosm of one small patch of London, as they do the world over. Oh, for a reckoning.