In the 1970s a British writer called John Christopher produced a telling view of the future.
In his book, The Guardians, a teenage boy escapes from the walled-in city, or ‘conurb’, and discovers a countryside where the wealthy inhabitants have banned the automobile and turned the clocks back to a more gracious, slower age. But secretly, behind the barn doors, the country dwellers are running things: they have banks of the most advanced computer systems controlling the affairs of the conurbs as effectively as if they were at its very heart.

Anthony Cross does not keep his computers locked in the stables. Still, his comfortable farmhouse is not an obvious HQ for managing funds of £100m or more. Its main function, on first inspection, is the complicated business of running the lives of three children under ten. The kitchen and sitting rooms are dotted with their drawings, projects, toys and other multicoloured detritus. But it’s in the study, with the laptop screen ceaselessly updating price movements and news feeds from around the world, that the fate of that £100m is determined.

John Christopher set his book in Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds – convenient for the plot and another example of his prescience, given the huge sums of City profits locked up behind the honey-coloured walls west of London these days. But Anthony Cross runs his affairs far away from the glam spots of Gloucestershire. The house is a few miles outside the city of Perth. I went to visit him, taking the slow train from Edinburgh Waverley – I don’t think there is a fast one – through a sunny, open lowland landscape of hills, grassy knolls,, woods and prosperous farmland. We trundled on against the flow of the commuter traffic: and that’s not a bad analogy for the way Liontrust fund managers as a breed choose to work – against the flow, avoiding the congestion.

“I used to do three days a week in London,” says Cross, “but the noise takes a lot out of you. The hassle of airports means there’s a lot of redundant time. I feel invigorated not doing the commuting.

“Liontrust is moving more towards a culture where individual managers have a greater degree of autonomy. Where we live is nothing to do with the way we work.”

Indeed, there can be fewer more far-flung operations in the investment business. Cross runs his small cap growth fund from Perthshire. James Inglis-Jones and Gary West analyse European equities from their respective houses either side of the Devon-Cornwall border. Jeremy Lang can often be found plotting his UK equities strategy in Whistler as well as
Docklands. William Pattisson keeps things more local in Winchester.

It’s a policy that to some might seem indulgent, overdoing the ‘trust’ in Liontrust. As someone who works two days a week at home, I know the inevitable reaction you get from friends and colleagues still doing the five-day-a-week schlep: “Retired, have you?” In fact, all homeworkers soon realise that they are living by an updated version of Parkinson’s celebrated law: work expands to fit the time available – and the time available is seven days a week, 18 or 19 hours a day. (I am writing this, as a point of interest, at 11.55 on Sunday morning; the sun is out, the birds are singing and the pub is about to open. But Parkinson keeps me at my desk.)