Prince plays court jester during a testing year

摘要

It has been a year of leaving parties and empty desks as firms high profile and low key felt the full impact of the downturn.rnBy the summer, commentators had given up calling the economic crisis a "credit crunch" and even the government was forced to admit that the UK was in the grips of a fully fledged recession which has hit white collar workers like never before.rnThe downturn has hit the world's most famous firm, Foster & Partners, as well as newly minted architecture graduates, and the Job Centre Plus has become a distressingly familiar destination for up to one in 20 registered architects.