Canary Wharf and the City: the risk lives on the pavement, not the boardroom.

The towers here are close to impregnable — turnstiles, pass readers, front-of-house teams who know every regular face. That is not where the exposure sits. It sits in the walk from car to lobby, the short unprotected stretch between a meeting on the thirtieth floor and a car idling on Bank Street, the taxi rank when a call has run long. Close protection and secure driving here are built around that gap: getting a principal between buildings, between towers, between a boardroom and a car, with nothing left to chance in the thirty seconds that actually matter.

We cover dawn starts ahead of the markets opening and the late closes that follow a call that overran, event floors during conference season, and the particular pressure of results day, when an executive’s face is suddenly the story and the walk to the car is no longer routine. We know the DLR’s moods — the platforms that flood at 8am and empty just as fast, the interchange crush at Bank — and we use the river and the pier as a working alternative when the roads or the crowds make the obvious route the wrong one. Our officers are built to read as colleagues, not guards: a step behind in a lift lobby, a presence a stranger would take for someone from another floor.