The impressive intersection of the ground floor banking hall with columns of strikingly square section; the central desk was once a light well for the basement floors.
Midland Bank was once the largest deposit bank in the world, and its head office in Poultry, just a few steps from the Bank of England in the City, was a purposeful palace of finance in a prime location.
The architect was the venerated Edwin Lutyens, working with John Gotch and Charles Saunders. Lutyens was responsible for the imposing façade and many of the interior spaces. The most impressive of these is the enormous banking hall laid out in the shape of a cross, lined with classical columns of green African Verdite, most of which are square in section. Contrasting white marble covers the walls, and teak provides the surfaces of the counters. The lofty aisles intersect over a light well that illuminates the lower floors. When it was first opened, some said the design resembled a booking hall in a railway terminus, but the sense of solidity and prosperity was palpable.
The impressive intersection of the ground floor banking hall with columns of strikingly square section; the central desk was once a light well for the basement floors.
When Lutyens was commissioned to design the bank in 1924, he had come a long way from drawing vernacular English cottages designed to nestle perfectly in the Surrey countryside. A link with those days was his collaborator Gertrude Jekyll, garden designer, who was related to the Midland chairman Reginald McKenna, and who seems to have forged a connection between them. In any case, Lutyens was by then famous and well into his grand period, and Midland Bank wanted prestige and branding. Gotch and Saunders, the other architects engaged, designed over 140 branches for the Midland after the First World War. Between them, the result at the headquarters building was an unmistakably modern bank with a strong corporate identity. The upper-floor offices for the chairman and directors, the boardroom, staircases and even some of the furniture has been attributed to Lutyens. But a report on the building by the property company selling it in 2009 said that the first to third floors had no elements by Lutyens, a fact which may make it easier to develop those areas for future use.
This cabinet in the boardroom corridor, for the storage of directors’ top hats and canes, has been attributed to the architect Edwin Lutyens himself.
Oak-panelled fifth floor boardroom with large scale Arthur Lee-manufactured tapestry on upper wall. All the significant Lutyens-designed offices on the fourth and fifth floors remain intact
One of influences on the exterior was the fact that Poultry is comparatively narrow, making it hard to obtain a good view of the bank from street level. Lutyens designed a small degree of setback, storey by storey, and reduced the depth of the Portland stone courses layer by layer upwards. The optical result is to increase the impression of height, of a tall building receding into the sky.
Spiral staircase.
For the safe deposit area on the lower ground floor he designed another grand space, and the Chatsworth Safe Company manufactured a state-of-the-art 25-ton circular strongroom door, finely balanced on precision hinges. It was installed after first being shown at Wembley’s British Empire Exhibition in 1924 as a modern wonder.
Safe deposit entrance with 25-ton vault door, guarding 3,800 private boxes of varying sizes.
Built in stages between 1925 and 1939, the bank properly belongs to the twilight era of British global influence and power. Midland Bank had been founded in Birmingham in 1836, and had been shrewdly developed, gaining a place in the capital by acquisition of two London banks in the 1890s. After the Second World War, Midland took its place as one of the big four British clearing banks, and the head office was maintained and expanded. By 1992 the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) had fully absorbed Midland, and banking came to end in the building when HSBC sold it off in 2005. After several onward sales and false starts over the next eight years, 27–35 Poultry stands poised for transformation into a hotel, with 250-plus rooms and suites, and a planned opening date of 2017. The rating for the hotel is projected to be ‘six star’, which is at least a tribute to the grandness of the original.
The grandeur of the management’s suite of offices on the fourth floor.