By 1791, No.67 Lombard Street (before the street numbering introduced in 1766-70 it was known as The Plough) - on the east corner of Change Alley opposite Martin's Bank at No.68 (The Grasshopper) on the west corner - had been bought from a Mrs Corrall. This gave a large though difficult site for the rebuilding of the Bank. Dance's first design placed the banking hall on the first floor above Change Alley but a second design, close to what was built had it on a slightly raised ground floor with the Alley running through the ground floor. Both designs have a four-bay front with the upper windows centred over the round arched first and subsequently ground floor openings. As built, the elevation was of five bays. This was perhaps because the proposed entrance to the bank through Change Alley would not have been sufficiently visible and also because, while the four-bay composition worked aesthetically at the lower level, the proportion of window to wall of the upper floors was awkward.

The total cost of the new building came to £8,796, on which Dance charged the usual fee of 5 per cent (£439.16.0). The builders were Pinder and Norris (masons, paid £1,756.11.0 for work commencing 16 July 1792), Thomas Poynder (bricklayer, paid £2,291.2.10¼ for work commencing 6 December 1792), John and William Poynder (plumbers, paid £686.1.1½ for work commencing 31 August 1792), Thomas Palmer (plasterer, paid £282.11.7 for work done in 1794), James Fisher (carpenter and joiner, paid £2,847.15.1¼ for work done 1793-4). Other craftsmen included Larkin, Eade & Company (smiths and ironmongers, paid £500). Kerr & Company supplied 'Eldorado [patent] sashes' and patent slating was supplied by Samuel Wyatt.

In 1874, Martin's exchanged 67 Lombard Street and £7,000 for Garraway's Coffee House, belonging to Glyn's, which lay in the confusing hinterland behind 68 Lombard Street and its neighbours. Norman Shaw then designed for Martin's a red-brick, Queen Anne building on the site of Garraway's, lining the old banking hall with oak panelling to match the new offices. Glyn's architect remodelled the ground and first floors of 67 Lombard Street leaving the upper storeys as Dance had designed them.

Two photographs taken after 1874, and another in 1928 (Barclays Bank Group Archive: Acc 9/593), show a five-bay, three-storey with dormer attic front above the differing, slightly raised ground floors of 67 and 68 Lombard Street. The brick upper storeys have the same plain detailing as Dance's elevation [SM D3/10/3] while the three extant bays of Martin's Bank have the semicircular-headed windows, distinctive capitals and first floor lattice window guards also shown in [SM D3/10/1].

Nos 67 and 68 Lombard Street survived until demolished (with other buildings) for a new Martin's Bank and Glyn, Mills & Co. bank building by Sir Herbert Baker and A.T. Scott, 1930-32. More recently Regus, a service office company, has occupied the building through which Change Alley still runs.

LITERATURE. J. B. Martin, "The Grasshopper" in Lombard Street, 1892, pp.311-15; R. Fulford, Glyn's 1753-1953, six generations in Lombard Street, 1953, pp.7, 163-4; G. Chandler, Four centuries of banking, 2 vols, passim, 1964; Stroud pp.159-60; Kalman pp.231-2, 383 n.12; S. Bradley & N. Pevsner, London 1: the City of London, 1997, p.537.

OTHER SOURCES. The Martin's Bank archive is housed in the Barclays Bank Group Archives, Manchester.