The founder of FT Alphaville, Paul Murphy, has moved on to the editorship of FT Investigations but stops by da 'Ville from time to time with some thoughts, oftentimes connected to Alphaville or the Financial Times. Here it is an easy familiarity with a very old part of London.
From FT Alphaville:The Worshipful Company of Stoners
Sir Joseph Nathaniel Lyons DL will be spinning in his grave.
Trudging through a dank and deserted Square Mile this week, turning the corner at Old Broad Street onto Throgmorton Street, an Alphaville regular came across this . . .
Those are plastic pots for holding plants. Pot plants. Weed.
This is the subterranean site of the long-closed, but Grade 1-listed, Throgmorton Bars and Restaurant, that included The Long Room — gossip-central for stock market traders until the closure of the London Stock Exchange floor in the late 80s.
It was the inspiration for Alphaville’s own Long Room forum.
Thorgmortons sits deep underground, beneath the Worshipful Company of Drapers, who have been there since 1543, when the livery hall purchased the London mansion of Thomas Cromwell from King Henry VIII. Cromwell had lost his head three years earlier, of course....
....MUCH MORE
It was because of Throgmortons that I learned Izabella Kaminska had become editor of FT Alphaville.November 26, 2017
UPDATED - Gambling, Investing and Congratulations to Izabella Kaminska of the Financial Times
Last week the Throgmorton Restaurant came up in conversation and later I
was googling around for it and ended up at the Wikipedia page for FT Alphaville and started screaming like a lunatic: "Would you look at this! Look at this!"
Being the only person in the room the response I received was muted but this is what I saw:
FT Alphaville is a daily news and commentary service for financial market professionals created by the Financial Times in October 2006.[1] The founding editor was Paul Murphy he was succeeded in 2017 by Izabella Kaminska....Ha!
There had been no announcement (that I saw) at FTAV regarding who Mr. Murphy's successor would be (he's now doing deep-dive investigations), and not being easily convinced of pretty much anything I had to visit Alphaville's Meet the Team page and son-of-a-gun, words fail but for a sincere: Well Done Izabella.
Now, with that introduction I am going to do something I very rarely do, copy out more than a sentence or three from the FT itself vs. copy-n-paste from the the online flagship which we do at least weekly. I'll explain why after the jump. Here is Ms Kaminska writing at the Financial Times, November 21:....
*****
.... And why did I end up at Alphaville's Wikipedia page? The FTAV Long Room!:
..."The Long Room" is named after a dining room of a City of London bar/restaurant on Throgmorton Street[2][3] that used to be frequented by stockbrokers, bankers and insurance brokers when the London Stock Exchange was located on Threadneedle Street.[6][7]Which had a couple of the search keywords for what had been my target:
Throgmorton Restaurant
The Throgmorton Restaurant, situated at the heart of London's business centre between the Stock Exchange and the Bank of England, was opened on 15 October 1900. Lyons had secured an 80-year lease on a property in Throgmorton Street in 1897 from the Worshipful Company of Drapers and spent £30,000 in building the restaurant and offices above.....MUCH MORE
Wrapping up: good luck to Ms Kaminska in her new position and to Mr Murphy in his.
(although for some reason I am
picturing Paul heading up the Zambezi to rendezvous with Joseph
Cotterill and continuing on to Lubumbashi DRC to do some ambush
journalism on....damn, that's a screenplay)
Our only other mentions of Throgmorton Street were in a 2011 piece on David Ricardo:
HOW THE RICHEST ECONOMIST IN HISTORY GOT THAT WAY
