LONDON’S OLD LADY

Taranaki Daily News, 27 October 1932, Page 7

LONDON’S OLD LADY

SHE “SCRAPS” A TRADITION.

WORLD’S MOST VALUABLE SITE. For nearly 150 years the Bank of England has had its home on a three-acre island site surrounded by a squat black one-storey 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 aud cornices With greyish-white. This blind fortress wall is all that has heretofore been visible of the bank from th© outside—this, and the beadles in beaver hats and salmon pink capes who guard its gates.. i - < It is difficult enough to imagine a onestory 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 sit© in th© world. It is, -of course, easy enough to explain the presence of a one-storey 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 twostorey 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-flung than the British Empire itself. It is one ot the wonders of the worldwide 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 holders, 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 inew buildings now stand groups! about it ar© larger in point or .deposits than- the Bank of England itself, but none of them exercises 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 mysterv, which characterise the Bank of Englarid, that around it ripples a constant current of affectionate jest on tne subject of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street and her curls and her crinolines. The mystic thread of continuity remains unbroken. The old wall remains intact except where the tail 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 storeys. 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. In addition to the outside wall, several of the best known parts of the interior —'Which architects have described as the only “palace” in the city—have. been carried through the great rebuilding with as little modification as possible. Th© main entrance in Thrcadneedle Street has been changed more than most of the better known parts, although the new Garden Court preserves at least the memory of the leafy garden court of old. Most city men know the Lothbury Court entrance better, and her 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 ante-rooms leading to the court room, 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. Has the Bank of England ever before been known to exhibit to the cutside 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 practiced it for generation after generation in the dark fortress in the heart of the city. We see the strange rites of “moving gold,” “weighing gold’ and receiving bullion.”- We see governors, directors and chief officials attired *n the stiff black canonicals of their creed. We see “a director announcing the bank rate, to chief officials.” It may be that none of this has 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.