London calling.
Hearken.
Back we go to March 26th, 1973.
Mark it. Ring it.
Underline it in red ink.
Because on that day,
the doors of the London Stock Exchange swung open –
and history walked in,
on sensible shoes,
into a forest of bowler hats and pinstripes.
Now picture the scene.
Not the cool, glassy,
algorithm-driven City of today. No.
This is the old Exchange.
“The House.”
A roaring, jostling,
paper-strewn bear pit.
Deals shouted across the floor. Hands slicing the air in coded signals.
Jackets off.
Tempers up.
Fortunes flickering in and out of existence in seconds.
And for nearly 200 years,
it had been a men-only club.
Not unofficially.
Not by accident.
By design.
Women need not apply.
And then, March 26th, 1973.
In they come.
A handful at first.
Pioneers.
Pathfinders.
You can almost hear the intake of breath ripple across the trading floor.
Conversations falter.
Eyebrows climb.
Someone drops a pen.
Someone else drops a prejudice, though perhaps not immediately.
Because this wasn’t just
a rule change.
It was a cultural detonation.
Here’s the thing.
Women had always been in the money game.
Always.
They invested.
Speculated.
Won big.
Lost bigger.
The great bubbles and crashes of London history were not exclusively male entertainments. Women were right there,
buying South Sea shares in 1720, riding the wave up,
crashing down with everyone else.
But the inner sanctum,
the floor of the Exchange, remained barred.
You could play the game.
You just couldn’t enter the stadium.
Why?
Ah.
The old greatest hits.
Too emotional.
Too fragile.
Not suited to the rough and tumble.
Which is a bit like saying a sailor can’t handle the sea because it’s occasionally choppy.
By the late 1960s,
those arguments were beginning to sound not just outdated but faintly ridiculous.
The world had changed. Legislation was shifting. Expectations were shifting faster.
And the Exchange,
staid, traditional, immovable, found itself under pressure.
Legal pressure.
Social pressure.
The slow, irresistible pressure of common sense.
And so, early 1973,
the decision is taken.
Women will be admitted.
But it’s March 26th that matters.
That’s the day the theory becomes reality.
The line is crossed.
The threshold stepped over.
The barrier that had excluded half the population was finally breached.
Now, let’s linger there for a moment.
Because this is where London history becomes deliciously tangible.
Those first women walk in and discover something rather basic.
The place isn’t ready for them.
At all.
No proper facilities.
No infrastructure.
No thought given to their existence in that space.
Progress in London,
as so often,
comes down to plumbing.
And then there’s the atmosphere.
Accounts vary.
Some recall curiosity.
Some a frostiness you could skate on.
Some a kind of baffled gallantry, like Edwardian gentlemen encountering a flying machine.
But what everyone agrees on
is this:
it was noisy, chaotic, overwhelming.
And they got on with it.
Here’s a corker of a context point.
1973 is not a quiet year.
Britain is entering the European Economic Community.
Inflation is stirring.
The oil crisis is looming on the horizon like a thundercloud.
The financial world is about to be shaken to its foundations anyway.
And into that maelstrom
step the first women of the London Stock Exchange.
Talk about timing.
And once they were in,
something very important happened.
Nothing.
No collapse.
No crisis.
No delicate sensibilities shattered beyond repair.
The market carried on.
Deals were struck.
Prices rose and fell.
The great machine of finance didn’t even hiccup.
Which rather gave the game away.
Because what those first women demonstrated,
without speeches,
without banners,
just by doing the job,
was that all those old arguments were built on sand.
Or perhaps on something less polite.
Now fast forward.
Glass towers.
Digital screens.
Trades executed in microseconds. Billions moving invisibly through fibre-optic cables.
It feels like another planet.
But within living memory,
that world excluded women entirely.
That’s not ancient history.
That’s yesterday with better tailoring.
And the echoes remain.
The City still wrestles with questions of representation, culture,
balance.
The past doesn’t vanish.
It lingers.
It mutters.
It occasionally shouts.
But that day,
March 26th, 1973,
was a hinge moment.
The door opened.
And it stayed open.
There’s a wider London story here.
Because this city is full of thresholds.
The Inns of Court.
Even the pubs,
once divided into public bars and saloon bars,
with their own quiet codes about who belonged where.
And every so often,
someone crosses a line that has held for generations.
And the world tilts,
just a fraction.
So next time you’re near Paternoster Square,
where the Exchange now stands in its modern incarnation,
pause.
Close your eyes.
Hear the roar of the old trading floor.
Smell the paper,
the ink,
the sweat,
the ambition.
And then see them.
Those first women.
Walking in.
March 26th, 1973.
No fanfare.
No drumroll.
Just the simple,
revolutionary act of going where they had always been told they could not go.
London calling.
History in a doorway.
And proof,
if ever it were needed,
that sometimes the biggest changes don’t arrive with a bang.
They arrive on a Monday morning,
in sensible shoes,
and get straight down to business.
Now as for tomorrow…
A little journey without leaving your seat.
We’re setting our sights
just beyond the edge of London –about fifteen minutes from West Hampstead –
to a place where the world feels entirely different.
Romans.
Martyrs.
A cathedral that seems to go on forever.
And pubs that have been quietly perfecting the art of the pint for centuries.
Yes, tomorrow,
we tell the St Albans story.
For a very good reason.
Next week –
Wednesday, April 1st –
we’re going there for real.
Going there in style.
Going there in the very best hands.
One of the brightest stars in the London Walks constellation.
A top-flight Blue Badge guide. And in this case, something even better –
Alison’s local.
She lives in St Albans.
Knows it inside out.
So, yes, London Calling.
Calling: Let’s go to St Albans. London Walks –
and St Albans – connecting.
This is London.
Up ahead St. Albans.
Streets ahead.
That’s tomorrow.
A dash of St Albans for our dash to St Albans next Wednesday.
See you tomorrow.