Reasons for Designation
The former bank at 18 High Street, Maidstone, is designated at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
* a good-quality, typical high street bank of the 1860s, with an ashlar-faced Italianate façade;
* surviving interior features upstairs including staircase, fireplaces and panelled doors;
* ground floor contains a quite rare surviving Art-Nouveau shop front with curvilinear decorated bronze glazing bars and matching doors, inserted when the bank was converted to a hosiers in the Edwardian period;
* group value with the many listed buildings on Maidstone's historic high street.
Details
883/0/10028 HIGH STREET
15-JUL-09 18
Former London and County Bank
II
Former bank, c1862, for the London and County Banking Company Ltd; converted to hosiers in the Edwardian period. Later alterations including removal of interior fittings on ground floor.
EXTERIOR: the three-storey ashlar-faced 1860s building has an Edwardian, Art-Nouveau-style, ground-floor shop front and Italianate style upper floors four window bays wide. The bronze and glass shop front is symmetrical, with granite stall-riser, two large central display windows with decorative transoms, and outer doors in recessed porches, that to the right leading into the shop with bent glass to the display window, and that to the left providing access to the upper floors of the building. Curved glazing bars in an Art-Nouveau design feature in the transoms above the doors (in bronze) and the doors themselves (in timber), all the originals. The porch recesses have polished granite outer reveals and marble floors. The shop front is framed by stone pilasters of the 1860s, with Composite capitals. No original signage from the Edwardian hosiers or the Victorian bank survives on the ashlar fascia, but in the tympanum of the piano nobile windows are the initials 'LCB', indicating the building's origins as the London and County Bank. The detailing on the upper storeys includes Composite pilasters to the window surrounds, oversized console brackets above the first floor windows supporting sills with wrought-iron balconettes to the upper storey, and a raised parapet with decorative cornice.
INTERIOR: the ground floor shop has been comprehensively refurbished and no original features survive, save unadorned arched recesses in the outer walls in what would have been the banking hall to the front of the building. The upper floors are more historic in character. The staircase survives, with some balusters replaced (perhaps in the Edwardian period) at the lower landing. Further up are splat balusters with perforated patterns, which, like the large newel posts in an unusual design of Jacobean inspiration, are the originals. The upper floors originally housed the bank manager, and there are many surviving features consistent with a mid-Victorian residence, including at least five fireplaces, some in marble, panelled doors, cornices, a ceiling rose, frieze and other plasterwork, and built-in cupboards. All the original window joinery survives too, including windows overlooking a light well in the centre-right of the building.
HISTORY: The London and County Banking Company Ltd are recorded at this address until the late Edwardian period when the bank, by then known as the London, County and Westminster Bank following a merger in 1909, moved into larger premises at No. 3 High Street, Maidstone. At this time, No. 18 High Street was converted into a shop, recorded as being a Mr William Morling, hosiers, in the 1913 postal directory for Maidstone. The Art-Nouveau shop front is likely to date from this conversion. The bank at Maidstone bears some resemblance to other London and County Bank branches at Basingstoke and Stratford, East London by architect Frederick Chancellor and may have been designed by him.
By the 1860s, mergers between joint-stock companies had created larger banks which were ambitious to build more branches. Middle-class prosperity turned banking from a business-orientated activity, to a mainstay of the high street. The London and County Bank were in the vanguard of this expansion, as one of the few banks to have a presence in both the capital and the provinces in the 1860s. Their London headquarters were completed in 1862 to designs by CO Parnell and by 1875 the bank had 150 branches, making it the largest British bank at that time.
REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: The former bank at 18 High Street, Maidstone is designated at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
* a good-quality, typical high street bank of the 1860s, with an ashlar-faced Italianate façade;
* surviving interior features upstairs including staircase, fireplaces and panelled doors;
* ground floor contains a quite rare surviving Art-Nouveau shop front with curvilinear decorated bronze glazing bars and matching doors, inserted when the bank was converted to a hosiers in the Edwardian period;
* group value with the many listed buildings on Maidstone's historic high street.
