The Compliance Factory is broadly speaking Adam Samuel’s home office and the coffee shops surrounding it. Since January 1996, Adam has been providing training and solutions on financial services compliance and writing about the subject in books, magazines and online services. Before the pandemic, friends would come and work in the kitchen and use the creative tension which is now generated in various catering establishment or at least outside them, to write. My good friend and founder of my writing business, Chris Hamblin, once complained that the intensity involved made it a bit like a factory and so the name stuck. I even registered the name as a trademark.

The Factory has its friends: Chris notably but also former colleague, Malachy McClelland with whom much coffee has been drunk these past few years. Malachy and I worked together in the early 90s at the Insurance Ombudsman Bureau and we chew over various anti-money-laundering and financial crime issues together and so much more than that. Chris and I met through Derek Adams’ splendid pension review forums in the late 1990s and discovered a shared fondness for singing much later.

Various members of the next generation down have laboured here to restore order to some of my chaos: Gideon,and Francis B (no relation to each other), Elena, Rosie and Louisa have all ended up doing filing, accounts, proof-reading, technology purchasing and a variety of other jobs.

In its first Fitzrovian incarnation, the Factory day always started in either the Scandinavian Kitchen or Kaffeine in Great Titchfield Street. Now, Hart & Lova in Belsize Road (near Kilburn High Road Station) and various rather less distinguished outlets supply the hospitality.