This is Bank junction — the exact centre of the money. Seven roads meet here, and the grand building with the columns and the triangular roof is the Royal Exchange, where for centuries the merchants of London came to shout at each other and get rich. Look up at the very top, at the weathervane. It's not an arrow or a cockerel. It's an eleven-foot golden grasshopper, a hundred and seventy-seven feet up, and that insect is the toughest thing in the City of London.
The Exchange was built by a merchant named Thomas Gresham, who opened it in fifteen seventy-one — and Queen Elizabeth herself turned up and granted it the title "Royal," which was very good for business. The grasshopper was Gresham's family symbol. And this is what that little bug has lived through. Gresham's Exchange burned to the ground in the Great Fire of sixteen sixty-six. They rebuilt it. Then, in eighteen thirty-eight, it burned to the ground AGAIN — a fire so big it was visible from Windsor Castle, twenty-four miles aw
ay — and they rebuilt it a third time, the building you're looking at now. Through both infernos, the golden grasshopper survived, was fished out, cleaned off, and stuck right back on top. You cannot kill this grasshopper. Londoners have tried, twice, by accident, with fire. By tradition, it used to be re-gilded by the newest apprentice on the trading floor — sent up the scaffold in his first week
