Gloucester: Bank of England branch, Northgate Street: survey and designs for alterations and additions, with adjacent cottages in St John's Lane, 1828 (15)

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Gloucester: Bank of England branch, Northgate Street: survey and designs for alterations and additions, with adjacent cottages in St John's Lane, 1828 (15)

Notes

Acres's invaluable book (The Bank of England from Within 1694-1900, 1931, volume 2, p. 430) tells us that the Bank of England took over the building previously occuped by bankers Turner, Turner & Morris, opening for business on 19 July 1826. However, the Gloucester branch did not do well 'owing to the "attachment of country traders to local bankers' and it was closed down in 1849 and the premises sold the following year (Acres, op. cit., pp. 568, 573).

Northgate Street and St John's Lane lie south of the Cathedral and more or less parallel with each other. Northgate Street continues as the London Road and was the starting point of the route to London as well as a busy trading area and thus well suited as a location for a branch bank of the Bank of England. A survey plan (drawing 1) shows that the bank in Northgate Street owned six 'small tenements' in a close that bordered St John's Lane. These were demolished in 1832 (Acres, op. cit., p. 430). The bank was sited on the east side of Northgate Street (according to the compass on drawing 11). Acres noted that the building still stood (c.1931) and was numbered 13 and 15 Northgate Street (op. cit., p. 430). However, nothing in D. Verey and A. Brooks, Gloucestershire 2: the Vale and the Forest of Dean, 3rd ed. 2002, pp. 482-4, describes a five-bay 18th century building in Northgate Street.

Literature:
W. Marston Acres, The Bank of England from Within, 1694-1900, Vol. II, 1931, p. 430; D. Verey and A. Brooks, Gloucestershire 2: the Vale and the Forest of Dean, 3rd ed., 2002, pp. 482-4.

Jill Lever, January 2013

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Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

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Contents of Gloucester: Bank of England branch, Northgate Street: survey and designs for alterations and additions, with adjacent cottages in St John's Lane, 1828 (15)