← Today's Issue / Tech / May 16, 2026
Photo Essay

Inside the Last Working Mainframe in the City of London

A 1972 IBM System/370 still settles cheques for a private bank in EC2. Photographer Lucy Crewe spent a week with the two engineers who keep it running.

Lucy Crewe Wired UK 8 min
Operator's console, dawn shift

The room is colder than it should be — fifteen degrees, by design — and louder than it should be, and lit by tape drives that pre-date the photographer by a decade. Two engineers keep the machine running on shifts. Neither will be replaced when they retire.

The bank, which prefers not to be named in print, has tried four times to migrate. Each time the rewrite has taken longer than projected and the underlying business logic has resisted being made legible. The mainframe wins by default.

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