The ‘City’ is a useful synonym for the phrase: the British financial sector. Accordingly it is frequently employed, but inevitably with various shades of meaning, along the lines that ‘words mean what I say that they mean …’ This ambiguity has substantial implications because the growth of the financial sector has been characterized by both specialization of function and until the 1880s differentiated spatial development. As with the financial sector in its totality, the ‘City’ was (and still is) made up of many different parts – not only banking and finance, but also insurance, shipping and commodity markets. While spatially compact, these components were (and are) nonetheless functionally segmented, being integrated only to varying degrees. The result was the persistence of parallel markets both within the ‘City’ and beyond at regional and local levels. These gradually coalesced to varying and growing degrees; in the case of domestic commercial banking, initially through expensive correspondent and agency relationships between provincial and London banks.

In this chapter there is only space to review one particular point – when did domestic commercial banking become a full component of the ‘City’ and what were some of the effects of this combining? The point arises from functional specialization within the financial sector. This division of labour led to, for instance, the consequent absence in the UK, until relatively recently, of metropolitan-based ‘universal banking’, in marked contrast to its development from the 1850s in some European countries.