Former Midland Bank

The Former Midland Bank, located at 100 King Street in Manchester, is a bank building designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1929, in collaboration with Whinney, Son and Austen Hall. It is built from Portland stone and features a rectangular plan in a modernist classical style. The building stands tall with a slight batter, comprising ten storeys, including a basement and attic, arranged in diminishing stages of four, three, two, and one storeys. The north, east, and west facades are uniform, with right-angled re-entrant corners.

The first stage has seven windows, while the second stage features a 1:5:1 window arrangement, with the sides set back and obelisks in the re-entrant angles. The third stage is further reduced to a two-storey, three-bay pavilion at the center of a three-storey, four-bay attic. The ground floor showcases channelled rustication, three small windows in the plinth, and three large round-headed windows in the banking hall, which have small panes and radiating glazing bars. Each end of the ground floor has a tall round-headed doorway with a rusticated architrave, a triglyph frieze, and a prominent mutule cornice, topped with an unusual deeply-splayed horizontal embrasure leading to a small square window.

Most windows feature plain reveals and small-pane glazing, with the fourth-floor windows being square. The attic pavilion, resembling an 18th-century orangery, has Corinthian semi-columns distyle in antis, a large round-headed window in the center and in each return wall, storeyed rectangular windows in the outer bays, and cresting over the center. The rear of the building, facing Chancery Lane, is distinct with a giant semi-circular arch in the center and fewer windows, some of which are square at the lower levels. It also features a five-bay attic pavilion with pedimented outer bays and a three-bay colonnade in the center. Inside, the banking hall is notable for its circular colonnade.