There are a number of options for the centre of London, almost all dependent on how you define the centre of a city such as London. For today’s post, I am going to go for the Bank Junction as the historic centre of London – that point where several key roads meet in the City, in front of the Bank of England, Royal Exchange and Mansion House, which until recently, has been a place busy with traffic and people, as this image from the late 19th century illustrates, looking across from outside the Mansion House to the Royal Exchange, when it was described as “The open space bounded by the Exchange, the Bank, and the Mansion House is perhaps the busiest in all the City:

And it was much the same in the 1920s, although there are some subtle differences, including the war memorial that now stands in front of the Royal Exchange as the photo below was taken not that long after the First World War:

This is a very old part of the City, once at the heart of the Roman City, with very many Roman remains having been found deep below the current surface level.

The 16th century “Agas” map shows the key streets of Cornhill, what is now Threadneedle Street, and Poultry, and by the 1682 map of William Morgan, we can see the area around the Bank junction (which is slightly left of centre in the following extract), with the second iteration of the Royal Exchange (after the first was lost during the Great Fire of 1666), and where Poultry and Cornhill meet, we can see the Wool Church Market, at the site of the future Mansion House (see this post on St Mary Woolchurch, and the wool market):

By the time of Rocque’s 1746 map, we can see that the Wool Market has now been replaced by the Mansion House, and the first building of the Bank of England is shown in Threadneedle Street, simply labelled as “The Bank”:

By Horwood’s map of 1799, we can see how the rapid expansion of the Bank of England has taken up so much space between Threadneedle Street and Throgmorton Street:

In all the above maps, there are only four streets converging on the Bank junction – Cornhill, Lombard Street, Poultry and Threadneedle Street. The junction would get far more complex with the “improvements” to the City implemented by the Victorians during the 19th century, which would leave us with the junction we see today in the centre of the following map:

Where we can now see that Queen Victoria Street joins the junction via Poultry, King William Street has been built, with Lombard Street now joining the junction via this new street, and finally Princes Street, which was widened and straightened along the western side of the enlarged Bank of England.

And this was why the Bank junction was so busy. Cornhill to Poultry and Cheapside was for long a significant east – west route. The new Princes Street and King William Street added a north – south route to London Bridge, and Queen Victoria Street provided a direct route down to Blackfriars Bridge along with the Embankment route to Westminster.

To these through routes was added all the local traffic to the offices, shops and businesses across the City of London.

The geology of the area is one of the reasons why the City was established where it is. In the following extract from the brilliant topographic-map.com, the height of the land across the City is colour coded so that the blue / greens represent decreasing height and yellow to red indicates increasing height:

We can see the Bank junction just to the lower right of the centre of the map, and Cornhill is a hill that runs up to the highest land just to the right of Leadenhall Market.

The higher land around and to the right of the Bank junction is not as pronounced today as it was many centuries ago. Building and street levelling over the centuries has resulted in higher ground being much less pronounced, and originally, the land at and to the right of the Bank was one of the two main hills of the City, with the other being around St. Paul’s Cathedral, before the drop down to the Fleet River.

One of the City’s lost rivers, the River Walbrook once flowed slightly to the west of the Bank junction, cutting across where Queen Victoria Street, Poultry and Princes Street now run, at a much lower level to the current street surface.

Bank junction today, looking across to the Royal Exchange, with the Bank of England on the left:

There are two main differences between the view across the junction of today, and that of the recent past.

Firstly, and most obviously, are the tower blocks in the background. Secondly it is the lack of road traffic.

Over recent few years, the City of London Corporation have been restricting vehicle access across the City, and the impact of this can be plainly seen at the Bank. The part of Threadneedle Street to the left of the Royal Exchange has been pedestrianised, and the complex restrictions are summarised in the following extract from the City of London’s website:

I have mentioned this before, but whilst these restrictions have resulted in a much more pleasant place to walk, better air quality, and providing an environment where it is much easier to see the buildings surrounding the junction – it does leave this central part of the City lacking a sense or urgency and activity, of a vibrant and thriving place. It is probably though just the change from the City that I knew for many decades.

Apart from the new Victorian streets, the layout of the Bank junction has not changed that much, just the buildings that line the streets.

This was the view from outside Mansion House, looking across to the Royal Exchange in 1804, where the open space we see today in front of the Royal Exchange, was then occupied by Bank Buildings. The Bank of England is on the left and the tower of the version of the Royal Exchange rebuilt after the Great Fire is on the right:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

So there has been major rebuilding of the buildings that surround the junction, but the layout of the junction has remained much the same for centuries, with the addition of new streets in the 19th century.

The times when the actual junction has needed a rebuild is when the Bank underground station arrived, and when the junction, and the station below, was seriously damaged by a bomb on the night of the 11th January, 1941, when the bomb went through the road surface and exploded in the booking hall of the station, as illustrated in the following photo:

Many of those in the station at the time where sheltering, and the bomb caused the death of 56 people, with many more being injured, and today there is a plaque in the station recording the event:

Time for a walk around, to look at the streets and the buildings that surround the junction, starting with the streets. In the following photo is the Royal Exchange, and Cornhill is the street leading of to the right of the photo:

Cornhill is an old street, and one of the principal streets of the City. The earliest written record of the street dates from around 1125 when it was recorded as Cornhilla.

The “hill” element of the name is due to the street running up the western slope of the hill that peaks north-east of Leadenhall Market and “Corn” comes from the association with a corn market that was “held here time out of mind”, as recorded by Stow.

In the following photo is Princes Street, running along the western edge of the Bank of England:

An earlier Princes Street can be seen in the 18th century maps shown earlier in the post, however the Princes Street we see today has been straightened with the loss of a northern section, by the 19th century extension of the Bank of England.

In the following photo, the red bus is in Poultry, which is the street leading west out of the junction:

Poultry is another old street, with first mentions being in the 12th and 13th centuries. The name comes from the markets that were held here where poulters sold their produce.

In the above photo, the River Walbrook once ran across the street, in front of the new building in the centre of the view, the Grade II* listed No 1 Poultry, designed by James Stirling in the 1980s, although the building was not completed until 1997.

The photo shows how much land levels have changed over the centuries, as today there is no sign of the small valley in which the Walbrook ran, which was well below the current level of the street surface, which can be seen by a visit to the Temple of Mithras, now on display at the London Mithraeum, built as part of the construction of Bloomberg’s new European headquarters, a short distance to the south.

A slightly different view, with Queen Victoria Street running to the left of the new building:

Queen Victoria Street was built to help with the growing levels of traffic in the City, and to provide a direct route from the Bank junction, down to Blackfriars Bridge, and the new Embankment.

Construction was recommended in 1861 and included in the Metropolitan Improvement Act of 1863. The new street opened in 1871.

The new street resulted in the loss of numerous courts and alleys, as well as streets of a larger extent, which were swept away for its formation. Amongst those which had occupied the site of the new street were Five Foot Lane, Dove Court, Old Fish Street Hill, Lambeth Hill (part), Bennet’s Hill (part), St Peter’s Hill (part), Earl Street, Bristol Street, White Bear Alley and White Horse Court.

To the left of the above photos is Mansion House:

A permanent building for the official residence of the Lord Mayor of the City of London was one of the considerations for rebuilding the City after the Great Fire, however these plans were not realised until the 18th century.

The site of the old market was appropriate as it was located at a junction of important streets, which did not have any significant monuments.

The architect was George Dance the Elder, who at the time was the City of London’s Clerk of Works. and who took on the challenge of designing a building fit for the Lord Mayor of a growing City and which was able to accommodate both ceremonial functions as well as providing rooms for a private residence.

Work started in 1739, with completion in 1758, and the first Lord Mayor to take up residence was Sir Crispin Gascoigne.

The main reception room was (and still is) the Great Egyptian Hall. Not strictly speaking an Egyptian Hall, rather one based on an account by the Roman writer Vitruvius of what such a room may have looked like. The room today has a barrel roof which was the later work of George Dance the Younger in 1795. as the elder Dance had built a large upper storey, which must have looked out of place, and is shown in the following print of the Mansion House after completion:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

The large blocks on the roof were intended to give the impression of a complete upper floor as a backdrop to the Corinthian portico at the front of the building, but they look more of a distraction than an improvement.

There have been minor changes to the building since the end of the 18th century, but essentially, when viewed from the Bank junction, the building looks much the same today as it did when it was the first major City building at this important junction.

Moving around the junction, and this is the view looking down King William Street, built after approval was given in an 1829 Act of Parliament as part of improvements to the approach to London Bridge. The street was later widened between 1881 and 1884.

In the following photo, the church is St Mary Woolnoth, (see this post for the story of the Church with the Underground in the Crypt). King William Street is to the right of the church, with Lombard Street to the left. Before King William Street was built, Lombard Street ran up to the Bank junction. Lombard Street is an old City street, with a first mention back in 1319, and dependent on spelling, there may have been an earlier record of the street in 1108.

This is the view along Cornhill:

There is a statue in the middle of the road in the above photo, and it is rather appropriate given that much of the Bank junction sits on top of Bank underground station.

The statue is to the inventor of the Greathead tunnelling shield – James Henry Greathead:

Greathead was a South African, who came to London at the age of 15 and in 1864 he was apprenticed to the civil engineer Peter Barlow.

Five years later at the age of 24, in 1869, Greathead took on the construction of the Tower subway, the pedestrian tunnel under the river from outside the Tower of London.

Tunneling under the river was a challenge, given the soft, waterlogged nature of the ground, not that far below the bed of the Thames.

To address this challenge, Greathead devised what became known as the Greathead Shield, although it was based on a shield design originally used by Brunel, but with a number of improvements.

Greathead went on to work on other tunnelling projects, a number of which route through the Bank, including the City & South London line, which at the time terminated at King William Street (now part of the Northern Line), and the Waterloo and City Line, which now has its City termination at the Bank underground station.

The statue of Greathead is relatively recent, dating from 1994, when it was placed there for a specific reason. If you look below the statue of Greathead, at the area between the feet of the statue and the stone plinth, there is a grill that runs the full circumference of the statue, revealing its true purpose, as it is an air vent for the station beneath, and rather than just have a plain air vent, the statue of a person who was one of those responsible for the continuous improvement in tunnelling under London was a suitable addition to sit on top of Bank underground station.

We now come to the Royal Exchange:

The history of the Royal Exchange goes back to the City of London’s position as a major trading centre.

Long before the days of electronic communications, trading was a person to person business, with traders meeting and agreeing on prices, terms etc. All these embryonic activities led to institutions such as Lloyds of London, the London Stock Exchange, and all the other various exchanges for metals, coal etc.

In the 16th century, much trading was carried out on the street, or in the small houses and shops that lined streets such as Cornhill and Lombard Street, and there had been calls for a dedicated place where people could meet to trade, agree prices, and generally conduct business of all types.

Enter Sir Richard Gresham who became aware of the opening of a Bourse, or trading centre in Antwerp, one of the major trading centres of Europe. Gresham pushed for such a building to be constructed in the City of London, however despite the project receiving royal support, there was no suitable space available.

The proposal was taken up by his son, Sir Thomas Gresham, who also knew of the Antwerp Bourse, as he was based in the city for a number of years as a trader, working on behalf of the Crown, and trading on his own behalf.

Gresham put his own money into the project, along with significant funding generated through public subscriptions, which supported the purchase of a block of land in Cornhill Street, a short distance from what is now the Bank junction, and occupying the same site as the current Royal Exchange.

The building was opened by Queen Elizabeth I in January 1570, and it was the first, large, Renaissance style building in the City.

This first Royal Exchange was destroyed during the 1666 Great Fire, and was soon rebuilt following a design by Edward Jarman, but, as shown in the maps at the top of the post, it still faced onto Cornhill, and in the area in front of today’s Royal Exchange, there was a triangular cluster of buildings.

The following print shows the Royal Exchange as rebuilt following the Great Fire, with the main entrance facing onto Cornhill:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

The Royal Exchange consisted of a large central courtyard, surrounded by four wings which held offices for meetings, shops, cellars below for the storage of goods etc, as shown in the following print:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

This second iteration of the Royal Exchange lasted until 1838, when, as with the first, it was also burnt down, with the following print showing the still smouldering remains of the building:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

The Royal Exchange was soon rebuilt, following a competition to find a design. The competition was won by the architect William Tite, who seems to have also been one of the judges of the competition.

Tite’s design follows the layout of the original two Exchanges, with a central courtyard surrounded by four wings of offices and shops, however Tite’s design changed the main entrance from facing onto Cornhill, now to face onto the Bank junction.

The buildings that had once occupied the triangular space in front of the building were demolished, and it was opened up so that the full Corinthian portico of the new building faced directly onto the Bank junction, and seems almost to mirror the Mansion House across the junction.

The new Royal Exchange was opened in 1844 by Queen Victoria, with the following print showing the opening ceremony, and also how the new building had opened up the space around this important meeting place of City streets:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Within the pediment above the columns in the front of the building, there is a sculpture with the words “The Earth is the Lord’s, and the Fulness Thereof”, which was carved by Richard Westmacott the younger (his father of the same name was also a sculptor), and shows traders, historic, from across the world and from London. There are also small details such as a ships anchor to the left and pots to the right:

The Latin inscription, picked out in gold just below the pediment can be translated as “founded in the thirteenth year of Queen Elizabeth, and restored in the eighth of Queen Victoria”, to recall the founding of the first exchange, and the build of the third exchange to occupy the site.

There are numerous small details around the building, for example, the following has the date of the opening of the building as 1844 in Roman numerals:

And the cipher of Queen Victoria, the monarch who opened the latest version of the Royal Exchange:

It is interesting that the Royal Exchange is the only building that I am aware of in London where both the first version, and the latest, were both opened by Queens. Elizabeth I in 1570 and 274 years later, Victoria.

The steps in front of the Royal Exchange are also where the City of London proclaims a new monarch.

The current Royal Exchange has a glittering gold grasshopper from the arms of the Gresham family:

The Royal Exchange was not the only institution founded by Sir Thomas Gresham. His time travelling and working in Europe had also fostered an interest in learning, in trade, and in the benefits that the arts, technical and scientific achievements could bring to trade.

After his death, the executors of his Will founded Gresham College, to provide education across the arts and sciences, and which opened in 1597. A key aspect of the new college was that teaching was in English rather than Latin, which opened the college up to a much wider cohort of potential students.

The college originally operated from Sir Thomas Gresham’s old mansion in Bishopsgate, and then, rather appropriately for a period at the end of the 18th through the early 19th century, the college was based in the Royal Exchange.

A number of moves later, and today the college is based at Barnard’s Inn Hall, and offers a range of free lectures, both on site and online. There is a lecture on “Sir Thomas Gresham and the New Learning”, on the college’s website, along with many others, which can be found by clicking here.

There is also a whole series of lectures on London, which can be found by clicking here – perfect for winter evenings.

There are very many fascinating lectures and Gresham’s college continues to provide a wonderful resource for learning.

Thomas Gresham was perhaps the first person who truly understood international money markets and international trade. He served three monarchs, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, helping to keep them financially solvent, and during Elizabeth’s reign, his methods and contacts helped to stabilise the national currency.

He apparently could be rather unscrupulous in his dealings, including with his own family, and despite using his own money for the Royal Exchange, and leaving money for Gresham College, he appears to not have been particularly charitable during his life.

His name can also be found in the City with the naming of Gresham Street.

Returning to the Royal Exchange, the use of a building as a place for general trading faded later in the 19th century as specialist trading exchanges were set up to provide a place where trades could be made, meetings held, and news received in a specific and related set of commodities or services.

In 1939, the building became the offices of the Guardian Royal Exchange Assurance Company, and in the late 1980s, the company made substantial changes to the interior of the building, which included replacing the original roof, and an additional upper floor.

In 2001, the building was again refurbished, and reopened as a centre for luxury shops, restaurants and bars, and the Royal Exchange retains this function today.

Entering the Royal Exchange from the open space in front of the Bank junction:

The courtyard interior and roof today:

Next to the Royal Exchange, across Threadneedle Street is the Bank of England:

The Bank of England occupies a significant area of land of some three and a half acres. It has reached this size through a series of rebuilds and extensions over the years since the founding of the institution in 1694 as the Government’s banker, and arrival in Threadneedle Street in 1734, into a Palladian building designed by George Sampson, as the first, purpose built building for the Bank of England.

You can see the first Bank building marked in Rocque’s map of 1746, so much smaller than the complex of today.

The Bank of England has a number of key functions:

• As the Government’s banker, the Bank of England is the only institution authorised to issue bank notes
• Although they have shrunk over the past few decades, the Bank of England is responsible for looking after the country’s gold reserves
• And although the Bank of England is owned by the Government, since 1997 the Bank has been responsible for independently setting monetary policy, for example, by setting interest rates

Rapid expansion of the Bank of England commenced after 1788 when Sir John Soane was appointed as architect to the Bank of England, continuing work on consolidating and expanding the Bank of England and working on the large curtain wall that was finished after Soane stopped working for the Bank in 1833, and which completed the security of the Bank’s complex.

The Bank of England buildings that we see today are the result of a rebuilding programme carried out between 1923 and 1939 by the architect Sir Herbert Baker, and which resulted in the demolition of most of Sir John Soane’s work, and resulted in a rebuild described by Nikolaus Pevsner as “the greatest architectural crime, in the City of London of the twentieth century”.

The Bank of England, facing on to Threadneedle Street, as it was before the rebuild that started in 1923:

A photo showing the extent of the rebuilding between 1923 and 1939, from the 1920s books “Wonderful London” (as is the above photo):

The photo above shows just how the curtain wall surrounding the bank forms an almost castle like structure. Also in the foreground, there appears to be a deep excavation, presumably part of the extensive below ground areas of the Bank.

The castle like curtain wall was supplemented by a Brigade of Guards detachment, who had barracks at the Bank to provide over night security, continuing this service until 1973.

The Bank of England partly faces on to the open space in front of the Royal Exchange, and as mentioned earlier, this was covered in buildings up to the construction of the 1844 building we see today.

There are two large monuments in this open space. The first is a memorial to the “officers, non-commissioned officers and men of London who served King and Empire in the Great War 1914 – 1919”:

The memorial was erected after the First World War, and an additional inscription was added at the bottom of the memorial for the Second World War.

The memorial records the names of all the London Battalions that fought in the Great War, and it is a reminder of how battalions were formed from local areas and of people with specific interests, so you have the 11th Battalion Finsbury Rifles, the 17th Battalion Poplar & Stepney Rifles, the 28th Battalion Artists Rifles etc.:

The second monument is to the Duke of Wellington, which was unveiled on June the 18th, 1844:

The monument is here, in front of the Bank of England and Royal Exchange as a thank you from the City of London for the Duke’s help in getting the London Bridge Approaches Act of 1827 through Parliament. There is a full explanation on a plaque on the monument:

The Duke of Wellington also now sits on an air vent to the station below, as can be seen by the grill in the above photo.

The plaque mentions that a piece of granite from London Bridge was set into the pavement by the statue prior to the removal of the bridge to Arizona:

Each of the buildings and institutions covered in this post deserve a dedicated and much more comprehensive post, such is the history at this key City of London road junction. The other aspect that deserves a much fuller write up is the underground station that sits beneath the road junction.

Bank Station was one of very few London Underground Stations that had no above ground buildings, however Bank can no longer claim this distinctive feature following additional entrances to the station across an ever expanding area, including the entrance to Bank Underground Station that is now on Cannon Street.

But as you walk around the Bank junction, there are a number of access points, where stairs lead you down to the station below:

Whether or not you agree that the Bank junction is the historic centre of London, it is a place where major routes across and out of the city all join, and it is a place where three key and early City of London Institutions have and are based.

The Royal Exchange, although no longer supporting its original purpose, once represented the trading heart of the City, Mansion House continues to be the public face of the City’s independent governance, and the Bank of England represents the City’s role in the financial management of the country.

If you are interested in a bit of a deep dive into two of the places covered, I can recommend:

• Till Time’s Last Sand – A History of the Bank of England, 1694 – 2013 by David Kynaston
• Gresham’s Law: The Life and World of Queen Elizabeth I’s Banker by John Guy
• Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, edited by Francis Ames-Lewis

In addition to the Gresham lectures, you may also be interested in the following film that I found whilst researching today’s post at the Imperial War Museum collection.

Titled Britain at War, it is a film which unusually is mainly in colour, and has a lengthy section on London starting at 8 minutes, 30 seconds (it will probably not appear in the emailed versions of this post. Click here to go to the website where the film will appear in the post.)

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