Walk through the front door of C Hoare & Co’s Fleet Street headquarters and one has little sense of entering a 21st century bank.There are Napoleonic war muskets in the front hall, the tellers’ counter is a large wooden semi-circle surrounding a cast-iron stove, and the worn stone floor has a built-in gutter for dripping umbrellas.

London’s oldest surviving independent bank, Hoare was founded in Cheapside in 1672 by Richard Hoare and is still owned and run by seven of his descendants. Its customers have included Samuel Pepys, Lord Byron, Jane Austen and Elihu Yale, founder of the US university.