Former Bank Of England

Former Bank of England, now offices. Built 1844-47, designed by Charles Robert Cockerell. Limestone ashlar in Greek Revival style.

The building forms an L-shaped plan with a central banking hall and a right-hand rear block containing a stair well. It rises three storeys with a compressed, symmetrical front of 1:3-window range. A left-hand 1-window section of different design contrasts with the main composition.

The main front is set back between narrow end buttresses up to an attic impost band. Two outer porches in the re-entrant angles are linked by a low wall and railings. Giant distyle-in-antis Greek Doric attached columns support an entablature with triglyphs ending in triglyph consoles on the buttresses, beneath a deep cornice. The outer sections are banded ashlar. Above rises a tall pedimented attic set back between the buttresses, banded up to the impost band of pilasters. This attic contains semicircular-arched recesses with hoodmoulds, within which are similar arches with French windows.

The porches themselves are banded to the upper half, with battered eared architraves to double 6-panel doors decorated with small roundels. The ground-floor displays tall cross windows with recessed roll mouldings to cills, mullions and transoms, a Greek key band above between the columns, and narrow second-floor windows with moulded cills and sliding 2/2-pane sashes.

The left-hand section is symmetrical with fluted Corinthian attached columns supporting an entablature broken forward with rosettes above the columns, a central panelled shaft blocked with an inserted window to the right, and an open passage through to Albion Chambers to the left. Full-width tripartite windows above have guilloche strips between archtraves, acanthus sill blocks, and consoles to the first-floor cornice and second-floor pediment, with Vitruvian scroll to the lintels and anthemia below the second-floor cill.

The left-hand rear return features a bowed stair section facing onto Albion Chambers and a right-hand return with a stained glass stair light.

Internally, the central banking hall has been much altered with an inserted ceiling. A right-hand hall entered from the porch extends into the left-hand section, featuring a crested mid cornice, coved ceiling with shallow arched coffering in a star pattern, and cast-iron colonnettes with foliate capitals above the alleyway rising to the ceiling. The rear block contains a linking stair well, bowed to the left, with a cantilevered stone open dogleg winder stair and ornate paired cast-iron balusters. Fire surrounds are plain with cast-iron doors, panelled shutters and 4-panel doors.

Subsidiary features include attached cast-iron spike-headed railings between the porches and to the cornice in front of the attic, decorated with palmettes, and double cast-iron scrolls over the doorways.

Cockerell designed the Bristol branch of the Bank of England between those for Manchester and Liverpool, all derived from his Westminster Life Office in the Strand. The design demonstrates Graeco-Roman character of great power and gravity, making use of the intercolumniation of the portico to provide wide windows lighting the banking hall, with the third storey squeezed between the pediment and cornices. The contrasting side section narrows the composition and maintains width in proportion to height. The building was formerly fitted with railings matching the front to the ground-floor windows.