Marooned on Barclays Island

I shoot, I miss, and the mini-basketball hits the rim, bouncing away from the hoop. It makes a loud noise and now two lads playing ping-pong and wearing navy-blue pullovers are looking at me. I wonder if they can tell I’m an imposter. I shoot for the hoop again, americano in my left hand, ball leaving my right with the perfect amount of backspin and on a parabolic trajectory. Swish. Always finish on a make.

I’m not in an arcade, or a 1980s frat house. I’m in the European headquarters of one of the world’s biggest banks: Barclays. I’m shooting hoops in a room that used to be part of the B-Listed Kingston House, an 1878 warehouse-turned hostel-turned-corporate playroom. In 2018, Barclays began a £330m investment to salvage the building, incorporating it into the sleek new builds that now house thousands of bankers and dominate the south of the river. 

From the outside, it works. Blonde sandstone complements the teal ceramics and shiny windows of the surrounding office blocks pretty well. But on the inside, it’s like Severance (HBO’s corporate dystopia hit series). Crisscrossing beams are all that remain of the building’s past; everything else is a joyless commercial playground. Think of every type of net-based casual sport imaginable. Those inside can see into the street when shooting hoops or pinging some pong, but it’s one-way glass. If passersby could peer in, a sea of grey and open space would stare back at them. It felt as though this games room was put here because they had to use the building for something. It’s odd.

When the campus was first announced in 2018, the numbers were staggering: 2,500 new jobs, £330m in capital investment, and the total transformation of what was a few derelict sites and a car park on the now-renamed Buchanan Wharf. Four years after completion, the area itself is unrecognisable. Close to 5000 employees: bankers, fraud investigators, hairdressers, HR managers, they’re all based here, in this self-contained city within a city. As well as the standard perks — in-house canteens, gym, barbers and so on — staff social media posts highlight live pianists and singers in the entrance, swing chairs on the eighth floor, and even flash mobs appearing at lunchtime. Buses pick up and drop off employees straight outside the campus, no need to venture anywhere else.

As I’ll find out later, staff come from all over to work here. Lanarkshire, Clydebank, the city proper. Temporary workers will be coming from even further afield. With such an increase in footfall, I want to know how much of that spending power makes it outside of the bubble that’s been created here. Barclays is a behemoth, a controversial one at that. Recently it’s been under pressure for investment in Israeli arms companies, and the bank has a track record that’s quite strikingly on the wrong side of history, even for a giant financial machine. But how much is it part of Glasgow? 

The council is trying to make a big deal of the financialisation of the inner city economy, a la London. But whereas in the capital, or the likes of Leeds, ‘the City’ is a cluster of connected financial institutions, here — save for two bridges that take employees over to the likes of BT or JP Morgan, which aren’t exactly close — it’s just Barclays.

It feels like an island. To the north, the river, to the south, Tradeston, to the east, Laurieston, both areas known for the roads and rail tracks that cut them off from the rest of the city. And to the west… well, a vacant plot leading onto a housing project, where the river bank has been collapsing into the Clyde for the past ten years. The campus is enclosed by boundaries beyond the physical, and I’m here to see what it feels like to be inside them.