Last week, I gingerly made my way to a client meeting down the streets encircling Liverpool Street station - a trail I’d marched so many times, I could do it blindfolded. I entered the lobby of a large European investment bank I’d visited many times before, snaking my way from the steel and concrete revolving doors to the receptionists’ clipboards. At first, the visit seemed unremarkable; but there was something distinctive about this outing. Something felt weird – ominously clinical.

I ignored the creepy vibes and continued up the lifts, then realized my hunch was not completely baseless. For all the talk about “green shoots” in the economy, there were absolutely none to be found in this place. All the plants in the building had been removed.

I moved onto a second client meeting at a larger City bank, when, yet again, I got the feeling that something in their offices was a little bit off. I thought I might be stuck in some kind of a City twilight zone where everything in my environment had been juxtaposed – or worse – I was completely losing my mind. But as I went to post a document in the usual spot, I suddenly noticed that all the bank’s mailboxes were missing – they had become yet another victim of the City cost cutting.

Indeed, the axe has been wielded once again - alongside bankers, baristas and barristers, the City’s plants and mailboxes have been downsized with the best of them.

Those bankers unfortunate enough to be stuck in oxygen-deprived offices will undoubtedly suffer trauma as a result, not least because they have to use their 20 minute lunch breaks to queue at the Royal Mail post office.

The truth is that City investment banks have come to the ridiculous conclusion that, in order to beef up their balance sheets, they’d rather fire the postmen and destroy the foliage than cut back on employees’ bonuses. Admittedly, even for City standards, these priorities seem twisted. How can City banks justify paying six or seven-figure bonuses out of TARP funds, but still need to fire the guy who waters the plants all year for £15,000?

I know the recession calls for tough choices to be made, and I’d certainly rather see plants get binned before actual people, but I couldn’t help but wonder: when it comes to cost cutting, how much is too much?

The banks claim that without their ability to overpay, their “talent” would fly to greener pastures. Ironically, now that prison seems more hospitable than the inside of a City office, they may lose that talent regardless to companies with a few more signs of life.