Entrance area on the first floor, with stone vaulted ceiling and wrought-iron balustrade carrying uplighters. The paintings are of former Governors and Directors, and the Committee of the Treasury.
The Bank of England building is an imperial neo-classical seven-storey structure of the early twentieth century looming over a long perimeter wall built a hundred years earlier. Taken together, these two elements once caused a great controversy. Many architectural studies dismiss the building, designed by Sir Herbert Baker in 1921, as dull, bombastic or unimaginative, and describe the wall as the greatest feature of the bank.
Eight architects have been associated with the building since its establishment in Threadneedle Street in 1734, but only Sir John Soane’s work between 1788 to 1828 has been described as a masterpiece. Over forty years he created a series of offices, mostly no higher than three storeys, said to resemble a Roman basilica. Around this he designed a screening wall, devoid of windows, as it was designed as a fortified structure to resist attack. No lighting could come from the street side of the building, and many rooms are illuminated by a clever arrangement of top lighting. Only a single storey at the entrance portico projected above the wall. This building lasted for almost a century, and was being referred to as Soane’s Bank or the Old Bank when the time to change it came after the First World War.
Entrance area on the first floor, with stone vaulted ceiling and wrought-iron balustrade carrying uplighters. The paintings are of former Governors and Directors, and the Committee of the Treasury.
There was a compelling need to enlarge the bank as its responsibilities grew, and much of Soane’s bank was demolished in four stages between 1925 and 1939 and replaced by the new building, seven storeys above ground and three below. Destruction of Soane’s bank building generated great criticism at the time and since then the trend has been to increasingly venerate Soane’s work and deride Baker’s, although some sensitivity was shown both by the bank and the architect in the decision to preserve the wall and rebuild the bank. There had been calls by the City of London authorities for street widening, which would have required the demolition of at least one side of the Soane wall, and also pressure to modify the shape of the site, which is an awkward trapezium. Those proposals were resisted, the groundplan preserved and the result was a compromise of aesthetics, function and conservation, even if the building overpowers the wall.
A mahogany secret ballot box designed by Sir John Soane, architect and surveyor to the Bank from 1788 to 1833, kept in the Court Room. Designed in the form of a miniature ancient Greek temple, with a palm tree roof design, it was used during the 1800s by the Bank’s Court of Directors to cast votes at the end of countless important meetings. The ballot box enabled a voter to cast their ballot by reaching inside and dropping a small wooden ball to the left side for ‘yes’ or to the right for ‘no’.
Except for the eight gold bullion vaults spreading over two of the floors below ground, most of the functional working spaces of the Bank of England are unremarkable, but the formal rooms are stunning. Some rooms do survive from Soane’s time, and from an earlier architect, Sir Robert Taylor, from 1765–70, although rooms and furnishings have been relocated in some cases, or recreated. The octagonal Committee Room, where interest rates are set by the Governor and the Monetary Policy Committee, retains its original ceiling design and marble chimney piece. The Court Room, in green, pink and gilt, represents Taylor’s design and has fine plaster decoration and three marble chimneypieces. On a wall in this room is a replica wind direction indicator of 1805, driven by a shaft from a weathervane on the roof, which once helped inform the directors of the shipping arrivals. Soane’s top-lit Bank Stock Office of 1792–3 was reconstructed by historic architecture specialists Higgins Gardner & Partners in 1986–8.
The first-floor Committee Room, in an eighteenth-century style, where monthly meetings of the Monetary Policy Committee set the interest rate.
Court Room, including a wind direction indicator above the middle arch on the end wall, driven by a weather vane on the roof. A strong wind from the east indicated that ships were approaching London and that the Bank should prepare money for increased levels of trading in the City.
Today, an appreciation of Soane’s wall at street level requires a walk of half a kilometre and some imagination. Made of channelled Portland stone, it lines Threadneedle Street, Prince’s Street, Lothbury, and Bartholomew Lane, punctuated by fifty Corinthian columns and a number of pilaster low relief false columns, blind recesses and a single statue, which is of Soane himself. There are still no windows. A decorated frieze relieves the forbidding masonry on three sides. The colonnade which forms the north-west corner, or Tivoli Corner, was based on the Temple of Vesta, which the architect sketched during a visit to Italy in 1779. Along the length of the wall, Soane’s classic symmetry and symbolically empty niches can be hard to appreciate from the narrow streets. All the original door openings remain now filled with modern bronze doors decorated by sculptor Sir Charles Wheeler.
Bronze door on the Threadneedle Street entrance, with a caduceus design by Sir Charles Wheeler dating from 1930. The hand of Zeus grasps a bolt of lightning, symbolizing the electrical force powering modern banking.
There is public access to the Bank of England Museum on the east side from Bartholomew Lane. The first room of the museum is a reconstruction of Soane’s Bank Stock Office of 1793.
The Bank once contained a barracks housing a detachment of thirty soldiers, and a printing office where banknotes were produced. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 to raise money during a time of war and it spent the first forty years of its life in rented premises. It long functioned as commercial bank as well as for raising money for the government and was still owned by private stockholders past the middle of last century, but by then was acting effectively as a national central bank. It was nationalized in 1946, and became fully independent in 1998.
A ring of swords and bayonets surround an image of Britannia. Previously, the Bank had its own barracks, and a detachment of soldiers protected the bank until 1973.