BANK OF ENGLAND

Evening Star, Issue 21292, 22 December 1932, Page 1

BANK OF ENGLAND

CHANGED BUILDING SPECTACULAR ALTERATIONS ITS PLAGE IN THE CITY The square mile which forms the ancient core of the gigantic area of urban and suburban London—the old city of London, as distinct from the administrative county of London —has been rebuilt time and again, but it has never undergone a more spectacular rebuilding than it has witnessed since the war. It has expanded vertically on a scale previously unheard of in London. The low sky-line which used to characterise it has given way to what is almost a Wall street effect. At the very heart of the city, at the famous confluence of streets known as the bank, this upward growth has set in on all sides, with the result that strangers who have not picked their way through the traffic at the bank for several years would hardly know the place to-day, says a writer in an American paper. The bank is not only the heart o London, but also the financial heart of the world. The immense stabilty of banking London and the instinctive conservation of the English combine to produce a feeling that the three chief historic buildings overlooking this ancient corner—the Bank of England itself, the Royal Exchange, and the Mansion \House —shpuld bo themselves immune from change. The last two of these, although they are now surprisingly dwarfed by the tall new buildings around them, have suffered no change in themselves and no prospect of change is ever likely to confront them, not at least in our time. But it is a surprising thing to have to chronicle the fact that the Bank of England has joined in the upward growth. THE SAME SITE. For nearly 150 years the Bank of England has had its home on a threeacre island site surrounded by a squat black one-story wall which has become as famous as the bank itself. It is a handsome and well-proportioned wall, despite the fact that in reality it is a fortress wall, pierced by inconspicuous loop-holes at its one exposed corner and so placed as to offer a minimum of target at its other corners. All its windows are blind windows, and the acids of London’s air have stained most of its surface black and streaked the upper parts of its columns and cornices with greyish-white. This blind fortress wall is rill thLV has heretofore been visible of the bank from the outside—this, and the beadles in beaver hats and salmon-pint capes who guard its, gates. It is difficult enough to imagine a one-story building occupying any site as fabulously valuable as that of the Bank of England. Taking up an entire block, it may readily be called the most valuable site in fhe world. It is, of course, easy enough to explain the presence of a one-story scheme of banking halls and courts and gardens covering all of this huge three-acre site, for the whole scheme dates back to the one and two-story era of city architecture, and has survived as a historical monument —historical because of the 200 years of accidental, illogical, and casual accretions of privilege which have made the Bank of England the ruler of a financial empire

more far-lluug than the British Empire itself. THE BANKERS’ BANK. It is one of the wonders of the world-wide monetary machine of the city that, by. a process of; growth which has been peculiarly, almost laughably, English, an old private bank, responsible in any formal sense only to its own shareholders, should have become the Government’s bank, the bankers’ bank (as all central banks tend to become), the sole bank of issue for England and India, the keeper of the entire gold reserve of the country, the authority in charge of the credit and currency system, including inflation and deflation. Some of the big English banks whose tall new buildings now stand grouped about it are larger in point of deposits than the Bank of England itself, but none of them exercise her maternal powers and privileges. The old fortress wall has become so typical of the oldestablished, habits and_ traditions, above all perhaps of the habit of impenetrable mystery, which characterise the Bank of England, that around it ripples a constant current of affectionate jest on the subject of the “Old Lady of Threadneedle Street ” and her curls and her crinolines. It would be easier to. associate an attack on vertical expansion with almost any other secular building in the world. Yet the time has come when even the bank itself has joined in the upward growth which characterises the city’s latest process of rebuilding; The stranger may Well rub his eyes at the sight of the white new facade which lias risen above the blind and blackened wall of-the Bank of England—for until recently the bank, the Royal Exchange, and the Mansion House formed an architectural trinity' which seemed' for ever immune from change. UNBROKEN LINE. The mystic thread of continuity remains unbroken. The old wall remains intact except where the tall new building within has pushed its main front through and now presents to' the street outside a facade of white stone and massive bronze. doors with windows in its _ columned and porticoed upper stories. Such levity on the part of the Old Lady, such infidelity to the architectural crinolines of her past, must surely constitute the end of an architectural era in the city. The explanation is an obvious one. In common with everybody else in the city, the bank suffers from lack of room. Land ownership and land values being what they are, the time has long passed when it was possible to acquire additional room by horizontal expansion. Originally the block which the bank now occupies was shared with a church, several taverns, rind about twenty private houses. Long ago the bank squeezed out all these neighbours. Only the churchyard has remained. Its graves were removed; elsewhere, but, its, did aiid spreading lime tree and enough of its bloom and greenery have remained to form a pleasant oasis, called the Garden Court, in the centre of the one-story halls and courts and corridors which have long covered the whole of the vast three-acre site. Even the Garden Court has now gone, although a new court in the ' centre of the new building preserves the old name. In addition to the outside wall several of the best known parts of the in>terior—which architects have described as the only “palace” in the city—have been carried through the great rebuilding with as little modification as possible. The main entrance in Threadneedle street has been changed- more than most of the better known parts, although the new Garden Court preserves at least the mieraory of the . leafy garden court of old. Most city men know the Lothbury entrance better, and here Lothbury Court, with its colonnades and the fine arches leading to the Bullion Court, has been retained in all its essentials. The beautiful treasury and the inner treasury have been reconstructed and woven into the fabric of the new building in such a way as to be more easily seen than heretofore. The sequence of corridors and anterooms leading to the courtroom, where generations of directors have met, has been duplicated on the new second floor, but the corridors leading to the private rooms of the governor remain on the ground floor. • ■ ' . Perhaps nothing else in' the new building is likely to strike an outsider as being so incredible an innovation as the exterior windows in the upper stories. If the old bank ever had any need of light and air of the outside world these were supplied through interior windows and skylights, for no window has ever been known to pierce the old wall of the City’s Ultimate Mystery. Almost as novel was the sight of the series of paintings for the new building, which the bank exhibited at the Royal Academy’s summer show in Burlington House. Has the Bank of England ever before been known to exhibit to the outside world anything more illuminating than its blind wall? Yet in Gallery VIII. at Burlington House we see the worship of the golden calf as the bank has practised it for generation after generation in its dark fortress in the heart of the city. AVe see the strange rites of “ moving gold,” “ weighing gold,” and “ receiving bullion.” AVe see governors, directors, and chief officials attired in the stiff black canonicals of their creed. AA r e see “ a director announcing the bank rate to chief officials.” It may be that none of this lias a great deal to do with painting as painting is understood outside the fortress wall of the bank, but at least it helps us to understand why the pound sterling- is as strong as it is. These crowding innovations tempt us to the view that some unheard-of mood of kittenishness lias come over the Old Lady of late, that some break has interposed itself between her conservative past and a future whose quality is as yet unknown.’ But it is easy to rout this wholly erroneous view. The changes at the bank are no more than physical changes. Habit and tradition at the bank are always more indestructible than mere stone and concrete.