Former Lloyds Bank

Summary

A former branch of Lloyds Bank, built in 1904 to the designs of Horace Field and Simmons.

Reasons for Designation

The Former Lloyds Bank building, 36 High Street, Wealdstone is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:
* the building is a well-considered and relatively early example of Neo-Georgian design for a commercial, high street building which uses materials with subtlety and authority.

Historic interest:
* the design of this branch bank, of which this was the first example in this style, and other work by Field, had considerable influence on other bank designs across England in the decades following its construction.

History

Lloyds Bank bought a corner site in the developing village of Wealdstone, close to Harrow Station and commissioned Horace Field, an architect who had previously worked on other premises for the bank on the corner site at 40/40a Rosslyn Hill & 1-3 Pilgrim’s Lane, Hampstead, in 1895, in a style reminiscent of Norman Shaw (Grade II*) and Terminus Road, Eastbourne, in a loosely Edwardian Baroque style, in 1901-1902. The plans for the Wealdstone branch were approved by the bank's Premises Committee in June 1903. The final cost, signed off by the committee in 1905, was slightly below £3,150 and, unusually, the building was fitted with electric lighting from the start.

Bank managers tended to live on the premises up until the First World War, and that may explain the upper storeys here, and the domestic appearance of bank buildings here and elsewhere at this time.

A drawing of the bank was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1907 and the design was published in The Builder in April 1909 (see SOURCES).

A rear wing, presumably containing offices, was added in the early C20. It is not indicated on the Ordnance Survey map of 1914 but is shown on that published in 1935.

The building was subject to internal division and reordering in the late C20 or early C21 and was sold by Lloyds in 2019.

Details

A former branch of Lloyds Bank, built in 1903-1905 to the designs of Horace Field.

MATERIALS & PLAN: red brick laid in English bond with Portland stone dressings and a hipped slate roof. The building has three principal floors and an attic and the rear wing has two storeys.

EXTERIOR: the bank is placed on a corner, with a narrow front facing the High Street and a longer return to Peel Street. At the corner is a porch built into the fabric, and now enclosed, with arched openings to the west and north sides. A cartouche at the angle shows the Lloyds emblem of a bee skep with the initials LBL in a deeply-carved Rococo surround. The high street has one broad bay at right which steps forward and is flanked by pilaster buttresses at ground-floor level with quoins. Above this are Ionic pilasters which rise to a pediment. A shallow bow window at ground-floor level fills the space between the buttresses and has a lower body of stone. Above this the windows are paired sashes to the first and second floors with exposed sash boxes and windows of three by six panes. The first-floor windows have gauged heads and slender keystones. The Ionic capitals support a pulvinated frieze. A deep wooden cornice encircles the building at eaves level.

The north face to Peel Street has four principal bays and the sash windows are paired, with gauged heads and keystones to the ground and first floors and exposed sash boxes, as before. Ground-floor windows have segmental heads and the right-hand pair of ground floor bays form part of the corner porch entry, also seen on the High Street frontage, with arched heads to the openings which have now been enclosed and glazed. The outer bays are defined by downpipes with hoppers which bear the date '1904'. The two central windows at second-floor level are wide triple sashes in place of the paired sashes seen below. Three attic dormer windows have flat heads and casement lights. To the left of this is a lower block, built in the 1920s, presumably originally office chambers, of two storeys and four bays whose ground-floor walling is of plum-coloured brick. This later addition is of lesser interest.

INTERIOR: the porch entrance at the corner, which has now been enclosed, has a groin-vaulted ceiling. The rest of the interior was not inspected, but was subdivided and reordered internally by 2009 (see SOURCES, Brittain-Catlin).

Sources

Books and journals
Pevsner, N, Cherry, B, The Buildings of England: London 3 North West, (1991), 301
Booker, J, Temples of Mammon. The Architecture of Banking, (1990)
Brittain-Catlin, T, Architectural History in Architectural History, Vol. 53, (2010), 271-294
Wealdstone Bank in The Builder, (17 April 1909), 233
Fraser, Murray, Sir Banister Fletcher's Global History of Architecture , (2019), Vol 2, 636-7

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