The Big Bang transformed the City of London – 40 years on, can it happen again?

The City of London was changed forever by a sweeping package of deregulation in 1986, known as the Big Bang. Forty years on and facing existential threats can the Square Mile reinvent itself again? When Alasdair Haynes left work as a young options trader on Friday 24th October 1986, he didn’t know what world would await him when he returned on Monday morning. For months technicians had been wiring up futuristic-looking machines in offices around the Square Mile. Haynes’s bosses had been running practice sessions on new electronic trading systems and briefing staff as best they could in preparation for the sweeping change ahead. The reality, he says, was more drastic than anyone could have imagined. “Everybody thought on Friday that there would be a few people off the [stock exchange] trading floor working in offices, and everybody else would come in. But we came in and the trading floor was practically a desert,” Haynes, who went on to found challenger stock exchange Aquis