Latest news with #CanaryWharf
The Independent
2 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
The City's U-turn on WFH tells you everything you need to know about bad bosses
Barclays has taken overflow office space in Shoreditch. HSBC, having decided to relocate from Canary Wharf to new headquarters near St Paul's, is looking for extra room, including moving some workers back to Canary Wharf (and has told staff that their bonuses could be cut unless they're back in the office). JPMorgan and BBVA are finding accommodating everyone a tight squeeze. And BlackRock is also struggling to fit in all its staff. Some City firms are using a booking system, which sees those who wish to come to the office having to reserve a slot, such is the demand for desks. After three years, Citigroup has shut its Malaga outpost, billed as providing a better work-life balance for the bank's analysts, and steered its staff to London. What distinguishes all these financial corporations and others is that they claim to only recruit the brightest and the best. They make fortunes from advising the rest of us, along with businesses and governments, how to manage our affairs. On deals, they take command, devise strategy, issue orders and tell those involved how to behave. Yet when it comes to their own internal management, they are all over the place. We've seen it before, of course – the sector is littered with numerous instances of banks and investment houses being penalised huge sums for their poor conduct or for showing a lax attitude to other people's money. Frequently, they've set out on one course only to change direction, usually at a substantial cost in both money and people. Their approach to working from home (WFH) and remote working shows a herd instinct – something of which they are often guilty. If their customers did the same, these companies would be the first to complain and criticise. This is the most stark example of the confusion that rages around hybrid working, certainly in Britain. A recent study by King's College London found that Britain is the remote-working capital of Europe, with UK employees WFH 1.8 days a week on average – a number that is well above the global average of 1.3 days, and the highest in Europe. Globally, only Canadians average more days a week at home, WFH for 1.9 days. Dr Cevat Giray Aksoy, associate professor of economics at King's and lead economist at the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, says: 'Remote work has moved from being an emergency response to becoming a defining feature of the UK labour market.' Dr Aksoy, who also advises the House of Lords on policy regarding the implications of remote working for productivity and labour markets, adds: 'This shift is forcing businesses, policymakers and city planners to reimagine everything from office space to transport to regional growth.' But is it? While his study may point to Britain being out in front or lagging, depending on how the figures are viewed, growing apocryphal evidence indicates something different. The City, for one, is signalling 'enough'. Stockbroker Panmure Liberum, reports the Financial Times, has joined Deutsche Bank in barring staff from working at home on consecutive Mondays and Fridays. UBS has told its folk they must be in on either Mondays or Fridays or both, as one of their three mandated days in the office. Broker Peel Hunt insists on four days a week in the office, while traders at Man Group are up to five. Santander views five days as the default option. Goldman Sachs regards WFH as an 'aberration'. JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon, probably the most influential banker on the planet, argues that remote working allows 'bad habits to develop'. Where the City leads, like it or not, the rest of the country, business and organisation-wise, tends to follow. Brightmine, which studies HR practices, claims that 15.1 per cent of UK companies have reduced their WFH hours. Slowly but surely, the TWaTs – those who go in on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays – have begun to retreat. What began as a temporary solution to Covid and morphed into a trend, then a stampede, is coming to an end. Commuter numbers are edging towards their pre-pandemic levels. There will be those who resist, and there are bound to be lingering pockets of refuseniks, but by and large, Britain will fall into line. Maybe not reaching all five days, but the number WFH will be lower than it is currently, and will no longer be an outlier. It was predictable, and the banks for one should have seen what was likely to happen. After all, that is what they do, paying huge sums to smart graduates and deploying state-of-the-art technology to forecast the future. Seemingly no amount of qualifications from Stanford and MIT, no brilliant algorithms or AI, no 'thought leadership' gleaned in sessions at Davos or elsewhere, prepared them. This, too, in spite of the refusal of the mighty Goldman and JPMorgan's Dimon to play ball. If they had only stopped to think, it would have been obvious. Those super-smart hires are also intensely ambitious. How you get ahead, anywhere, is by standing out, making the boss sit up and notice. It's by showing that creative spark, which often results from being in the right spot at the right time. Convenient as they may be, the stultifying environments of Zoom or Teams, or even the sunny delights of Malaga and the Costa del Sol, are not that place. Ours – again, like it or not – is a globally connected world where commerce and trade are concerned. Nowhere more so than in banking. Why should workers in London, or the UK, operate to a different standard from everyone else? It does not make sense. At present, many employers are on the cusp; they are playing a balancing game. They are keen to not dissuade, and some Gen-Z and millennial employees expect to have the option to work from home. For now. But as they see those who spend more time in the office forging closer relationships with the chiefs, and winning promotions and higher salaries, it is surely a matter of when, not if, that changes.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Health
- The Guardian
‘Transformative': the UK lab working on a way to halt genetic type of dementia
Behind the gleaming glass facade of an office block in east London's docklands, Dr Martina Esposito Soccoio is pipetting ribonucleic acid into test tubes. Here, not far from Canary Wharf's multinational banks, a British university spinout is working on a breakthrough treatment for a form of dementia suffered by millions of people worldwide. There is no cure for dementia at present, but scientists at AviadoBio hope their clinical studies can stop the progression of a particular genetic type of frontotemporal dementia (FTD). 'It may be one of the first dementias to have a definitive treatment, a cure if you like, a really transformative treatment that allows people to live much longer and much more normal lives,' says Prof James Rowe, consultant neurologist at Cambridge's Addenbrooke's Hospital. FTD mainly affects the front and sides of the brain and unlike Alzheimer's disease, does not begin with memory loss, which tends to occur later. It is characterised by progressive loss of language and changes in personality and behaviour. Most cases are diagnosed in people aged 45 to 65, but it can affect people in their 20s and 30s. There are an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 people living with FTD in the UK, and between 1m and 2m in the world. Rowe says: 'It's a double-edged sword: the young onset, the high genetic burden and rapid illness are also features that perhaps make it more tractable to treat.' The Die Hard and Pulp Fiction actor Bruce Willis, who recently celebrated his 70th birthday, was diagnosed with FTD two years ago, with his family calling it a 'cruel disease'. They have not said whether he has a genetic form of FTD. The gene therapy developed by AviadoBio, which was spun out of Prof Christopher Shaw's research lab at King's College London in 2021, targets a type of FTD known as FTD-GRN. This is caused by mutations of a gene that lead to a deficiency of progranulin (GRN), a protein that is essential for maintaining healthy brain cells. AviadoBio, which employs 60 people, signed an exclusive licence agreement with the Japanese pharma firm Astellas last October to develop the therapy. It is now recruiting patients for its clinical trial in the UK, as well as the US, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands. The first patient received the infusion in Warsaw in March 2024, out of six patients who have had the treatment so far, in Poland and the US. All patients will be followed for up to five years as part of the trial. AviadoBio expects to publish the first data next year. Three years ago, Jessica Crawford, from Beverley in Yorkshire, lost her mother to FTD, caused by mutations of another gene, C9orf72. In 2014, when her mother was 58, her behaviour changed; the family suspected depression. Previously very sociable, she stopped going out and started playing games like Candy Crush or watching TV shows 'over and over,' her daughter recounts. Her mother initially did not want to see a doctor, and was only diagnosed with FTD in February 2019. By this time she was so confused she once put raw chicken in a sandwich. 'Getting the diagnosis wasn't easy because FTD wasn't well known; my mum was aceing in the memory tests,' Crawford says. But her mother became increasingly confused and lost the ability to speak, and to communicate at all. Crawford became her full-time carer in 2020, until her mother deteriorated so much that she had to go to a care home in late 2021, and died the following year. Crawford, 33, found out that she herself carries the gene mutation, and with her husband decided to conceive through IVF with a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. When their five embryos were screened, four had the gene mutation, and the fifth resulted in the birth of their son. The couple donated their other four embryos to science and she takes part in GENFI – a long-running UK-led global study of families with FTD across 40 sites. AviadoBio itself was born out of the research done at King's by Shaw, a neurologist who has focused on FTD and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) for more than three decades, and Dr Youn Bok Lee and Dr Do Young Lee from the UK Dementia Research Institute's centre based at King's. ALS, the most common form of motor neurone disease, has also been linked to mutations of the GRN gene and leads to muscle weakness, paralysis and eventually death. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion Shaw acts as the company's chief scientific and clinical adviser, and while the Lees are no longer involved in the firm's research, all three remain shareholders. David Cooper, AviadoBio's chief medical officer, says: 'It was something that hit me when I first joined the company, you look at the MRI scans of patients with a GRN mutation, the frontal and temporal parts of their brain are just melting away … So we really need earlier treatment, an, earlier diagnosis and a more organised healthcare approach to deal with it.' AviadoBio's lead product, known as AVB-101, is infused directly into the brain by a neurosurgeon using a cannula as thin as a strand of angel hair pasta, during a 90-minute procedure guided by MRI. It delivers a functional copy of the progranulin gene to restore appropriate levels of the protein to affected areas of the brain. It is a once-only treatment, and no immunosuppressant drugs are needed subsequently. 'The patients who have FTD are born with almost half of the progranulin levels that you and I might have,' says chief executive Lisa Deschamps. 'Our goal in the study is to supplement the GRN gene and restore as much progranulin in these individuals as possible to normal levels to reduce the neurodegeneration effect. Other medications in development at AviadoBio include two gene therapies, from Philadelphia-based Passage Bio and Eli Lilly-owned Prevail Therapeutics, but they do not target the thalamus, the 'relay station' in the brain. Passage Bio's therapies are delivered directly to the cerebrospinal fluid in a single treatment. Denmark's Vesper Bio has developed an oral capsule, designed to act on the GRN gene, that is being trialled at University College London Hospital. AviadoBio, whose investors include Johnson & Johnson's innovation arm and the UK not-for-profit LifeArc Ventures, is part of a growing life science cluster in Canary Wharf. At its labs, scientists – assisted by robotics – research how to target a particular gene. 'The UK has real strengths in this area,' says Rowe, pointing to the international GENFI study, run since 2011 by Prof Jonathan Rohrer, a neurologist from UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology who also sits on AviadoBio's scientific advisory board. 'It's a real win for the UK.'
Asharq Al-Awsat
3 days ago
- Asharq Al-Awsat
From Homeless to Tour Guide: Londoners Lead the Way Round the Streets They Know Best
Stefan Gordon spent three years in a homeless shelter in London after a family rift left him without a roof over his head. Now he is using his past experience to tell the often hidden story of one of the capital's wealthiest areas. Gordon, 31, is one of several formerly homeless people trained by Unseen Tours to lead guided walks in different London neighborhoods. The charity's aim is to reduce the stigma around homelessness and value people's potential. "My view of homelessness is a person without a home... (but) just because they don't have a home, we can still do stuff," Gordon told Reuters as he led a group tour of Canary Wharf and West India Quay in east London. In the 18th and 19th centuries the area, now the capital's business hub, was home to a large dock complex built to receive products such as sugar from the Caribbean, where enslaved people were forced to work on plantations. The docks were created by and for merchants, but many of those who worked there were often badly paid and lived in poor conditions, something Gordon says he can relate to. "Lots of people used to sleep in lodging houses and the hostel where I slept was an emergency lodging house so I kind of related a lot to that," Gordon said. "It was very, very tough back then... It's still tough now." Gordon, who has autism, is now living with his mother and has been a guide since February. He gets paid 60% of the value of each tour ticket while the remainder is reinvested into Unseen Tours to cover operating costs and train new guides. Unseen Tours' director of communication, Charlotte Cassedanne, said the guides, with help from the organization, research and design their own tours, and can incorporate their personal stories into their walks if they wish to do so. They have been running for more than a decade, and 30,000 visitors have taken part in their tours. With six guides trained so far, Unseen Tours is currently fundraising to train three more. "When you experience homelessness, you become sort of less than human... People ignore you daily... Putting them at the center of the storytelling really helps them have agency again," Cassedanne said.
Reuters
3 days ago
- Reuters
From homeless to tour guide: Londoners lead the way round the streets they know best
LONDON, June 13 (Reuters) - Stefan Gordon spent three years in a homeless shelter in London after a family rift left him without a roof over his head. Now he is using his past experience to tell the often hidden story of one of the capital's wealthiest areas. Gordon, 31, is one of several formerly homeless people trained by Unseen Tours to lead guided walks in different London neighbourhoods. The charity's aim is to reduce the stigma around homelessness and value people's potential. "My view of homelessness is a person without a home... (but) just because they don't have a home, we can still do stuff," Gordon told Reuters as he led a group tour of Canary Wharf and West India Quay in east London. In the 18th and 19th centuries the area, now the capital's business hub, was home to a large dock complex built to receive products such as sugar from the Caribbean, where enslaved people were forced to work on plantations. The docks were created by and for merchants but many of those who worked there were often badly paid and lived in poor conditions, something Gordon says he can relate to. "Lots of people used to sleep in lodging houses and the hostel where I slept was an emergency lodging house so I kind of related a lot to that," Gordon said. "It was very, very tough back then... It's still tough now." Gordon, who has autism, is now living with his mother and has been a guide since February. He gets paid 60% of the value of each tour ticket while the remainder is reinvested into Unseen Tours to cover operating costs and train new guides. Unseen Tours' director of communication, Charlotte Cassedanne, said the guides, with help from the organisation, research and design their own tours, and can incorporate their personal stories into their walks if they wish to do so. They have been running for more than a decade, and 30,000 visitors have taken part in their tours. With six guides trained so far, Unseen Tours is currently fundraising to train three more. "When you experience homelessness, you become sort of less than human... People ignore you daily... Putting them at the centre of the storytelling really helps them have agency again," Cassedanne said.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Strawberry Moon rises over London as 'breathtaking' views shared on social media
A breathtaking Strawberry Moon loomed over London on Wednesday night, leaving skygazers starstruck. The huge satellite appeared lower in the Sky than usual and at one stage looked like it was sitting in Canary Wharf as it made its way slowly across the London skyline. It was later spotted poking behind St Paul's and the Shard in central London. Caused by an event known as a 'major lunar standstill', Wednesday night marks the peak of the full Moon, BBC Weather reported. #StrawberryMoon rise over #London tonight — Jeff Overs (@JeffOvers) June 11, 2025 The opportunity to see the Moon so low in the sky will not arise again until 2043. The rare phenomenon was also visible across the globe with photographers catching striking images of it rising behind ancient Greek temples as well as over beaches in Australia. The moon was also clearly seen across parts of China, Italy and Dubai. Many in London watched on from their balconies and windows as the moon appeared in touching distance. Meanwhile, wild swimmers in the south west took dips outside under the moonlight to embrace the 'magical' full moon experience. Every month's full moon has a nickname, and June's is 'strawberry moon'. The name comes from indigenous Americans, marking the beginning of the strawberry harvest, and has nothing to do with its reddish tint. The strawberry moon has a reddish tint because of its position so close to the horizon - which is also what gives the rising and setting sun its colour. This has got to do with how the light it reflects scatters through the atmosphere.
