Luca Jellinek

We are delighted to welcome Luca Jellinek as the Society’s new Treasurer. Here, he introduces claxity.com, a website documenting Classical architecture in the City of London, with its unique concentration of buildings that can be described as both ‘high profile’ in economic and symbolic terms, and ‘low profile’ in historiographic terms. The website offers a wide-ranging series of articles exploring the architectural heritage embodied by this vast, almost forgotten body of work.

A 1949 New Yorker cartoon, satirising the reliance of financial institutions on Graeco-Roman stylistic precedent. — *A 1949* New Yorker cartoon, satirising the reliance of financial institutions on Graeco-Roman stylistic precedent.

When architectural historians and theorists speak of vernacular buildings, the thought runs to modest typologies, reliance on local materials and regionally idiosyncratic built form. In that sense, the streetscape of the City of London ‒ with its grand corporate offices designed by eminent architects and featuring great expanses of costly stonework ‒ might seem the antithesis of vernacular architecture.

However, when it comes to site-specific conditions that produce a localised approach to building, the so-called Square Mile has many points of uniqueness. Though the City retained significant residential, retail and ‘blue-collar’ uses into the early 20th century, the vast majority of its occupancy, for nearly two centuries, has been ‘white-collar’ business, typically of global or at least national significance.

Given its economic role, despite the presence of many prominent civic and religious buildings, most buildings in the City are commercial ones with all that implies in terms of (im)permanence, programmatic choices and granularity of agency. The City of London, in the words of the social historian David Kynaston, has long been ‘a world of its own’.

I contend that, upon closer examination, the uniqueness of the Square Mile can be detected in the characteristics of much of its architecture, from the Regency period through the Victorian, Edwardian and even later eras.

This is not to say that City of London commissions were entirely divorced from broader national and international stylistic trends. Major architectural movements such as Neoclassicism, simplified Renaissance revival (‘Italianate’) and Beaux-Arts Baroque revival all impacted City architecture too (typically with some delay). So did the Gothic revival and other historicist trends. However, even compared to the standards set by 19th-century Europe, City commissions for many decades placed a particular emphasis on decorum and had a greater-than-average reliance on Classical or at least Classicist themes and devices.

The point about adherence to decorum is qualitatively and comparatively supported by the care and expense lavished on upper storeys, rooflines and subsidiary frontages, which were deployed in a City setting of often medievally narrow streets (with greatly sacrificed vistas) on buildings of a purely commercial nature.

The propensity for Classicism, even when affected by a fashion for more picturesque eclecticism, romantic Gothicism and the like, can also be quantitatively supported. There are more Classical orders, pediments and modillioned cornices per square acre of the City than in any other place of comparable size and temporal diversity. I think it is not too controversial to state that this affection towards Classicism reflected the aspiration for symbolic association with qualities of dignity, permanence, tradition, seriousness and even loftiness. In contemporary terminology, the constant appeal to Graeco-Roman Renaissance forms had a ‘performative’ element to it.

A reference website about City of London Classicism

Having spent the better part of three decades in and around the City of London, I have come to regard the stone-faced, declaratory Classicism of so many lesser-known City buildings as emblematic of this area. As such, it represents a cultural and artistic heritage that needs and deserves greater recognition, documentation and perhaps even appreciation.

The claxity.com website was established in 2019 to make available to the general public photographic material, historical notes and architectural descriptions compiled from the late 2000s on, and is an ongoing project. The comparative incompleteness of well-researched secondary sources on this typology has required some exploration of archival and primary sources in its development.

The relative obscurity of the body of work that the website explores inevitably limits information about the original building design intent to occasional articles in building trade journals or in-house publications. One hope, in publicising the site to fellow SAHGB members, is that insights and criticisms from architectural historians will help improve the quality and exhaustiveness of the website’s content. For the remainder of this article, I shall consider a few illustrative examples of the buildings that form the subject of claxity.com, in roughly chronological order.

Regency recovery and the expansion of aspirational commercial architecture

Tellson’s Bank’s cramped Georgian quarters as described in A Tale of Two Cities. — *Tellson’s Bank’s cramped Georgian quarters as described in* A Tale of Two Cities.

Throughout the early modern period and well past the 18th century, prestige architecture in the City was largely limited to churches, institutional buildings (such as the Royal Exchange and livery halls) or the headquarters of the few major corporations permitted by Parliament (such as the East India and South Seas companies).

The insurance industry was barely in existence before the 19th century, and banking and trading houses operated almost exclusively out of standard, post-Great Fire, brick terraced houses. Not only were these simple structures devoid of architectural pretensions, but the spartan nature of the buildings was believed to reflect well on the parsimony and therefore financial solidity of their owners, who almost exclusively traded under conditions of unlimited liability. The physical and figurative obscurity of City of London counting houses is exemplified by the satirical descriptions of the fictitious Tellson’s Bank in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

The economic and cultural recovery of Regency Britain, following the Napoleonic Wars and the 1815–20 recession, found some expression in more imposing buildings, such as Hoare’s Bank (1830) and the Atlas Assurance (1836). Hoare’s Bank, belonging to the better sort of private banks dealing with wealthy depositors (and still in business), was for many decades housed in entirely non-descript digs. In the late 1820s, three such terraced houses along Fleet Street were rebuilt as a single edifice, faced in Bath Stone and of plain but elegant astylar aspect. Though much less profuse than that of Victorian followers, the stonework, such as the scrolled brackets supporting the balconies and the simple aediculation of the piano nobile windows, is of comparable quality to that of West End buildings of the time.

The rapid growth of the insurance industry also had an impact on commercial architecture in the City, as the industry was closer in management and business practices to a modern corporation than to the family-owned firms that had dominated heretofore. A distinctive and even expensive-looking building was perceived, henceforth, as indicative of the company’s standing.

One surviving example, although considerably added to, is the frontal portion of the Atlas Assurance, on Cheapside. Here we see a fuller application of ornament and composition from the late-Renaissance and Baroque canon.

The windows are fully aediculated with pediment, subsidiary columns and balustrade. The dentilled cornice wraps around three sides of the building and the Cheapside aspect boasts two sets of pilasters (Corinthian and Composite).

Both Hoare’s Bank and Atlas Assurance featured from the outset the sort of spacious, ground-floor public hall for the transaction of retail business that became standard in later edifices. Also noteworthy is the use of arcuated forms on the ground storey, in both cases.

The Victorian building boom of the 1850s to 1870s

*City Bank, by William and Andrew Moseley (1856)*

Although the British economy and the City of London entered a recession in the 1840s, by that time the idea of prestige headquarters and offices for financial and mercantile companies was well established. The resulting pick-up in construction and conversion of City premises was gradual in the 1850s and 1860s, and accelerated considerably during the 1870s. Architecturally, however, the entire period was notable for the increasing variety of stylistic trends, the amount of applied ornament and, to a smaller degree, the increasing size of premises. From this period onward, the predominance of the Classical idiom was much less certain, with Gothic, Jacobean, Eclectic and Picturesque examples abounding.

Within the subset of buildings that retained decidedly Classical leanings, some examples of less famous but nonetheless noteworthy and representative works include the City Bank (1855), Credit Lyonnais (1866) and the Hampshire Bank (1874). Among more iconic representatives of the City’s Classical ‘vernacular’ of this period we would include the Royal Exchange (1841), the National Provincial Bank (1865) and Billingsgate Market (1874).

Joint-stock, limited-liability banks (other than the Bank of England) were not permitted in England until 1826 and even then could not operate within 65 miles of London until 1844. The subsequent creation and amalgamation of many small, individual banks required new premises at a time when Georgian demureness had given way to Victorian demonstrativeness in the realm of commercial buildings.

The City Bank, on Threadneedle Street, is broadly astylar (‘Italianate’) in approach and not too innovative in terms of articulation but the amount and quality of surface detail is characteristic of buildings of this period. It has thankfully retained some of the interiors pertaining to the former banking hall.

Built on a larger scale as a speculative development, 38–40 Lombard Street became soon after its creation the London offices of Credit Lyonnais and so it remained for close to a century. Again, what might have been essentially a mid- to large-sized palazzo is enriched by external stylistic treatments such as the canted corner and superimposed subsidiary elements (including columns on the piano nobile), terminating in a particularly ornate cornice.

*Credit Lyonnais, by Frederic and Horace Francis (1868)*

Edwardian Classicism: Refinement rather than Departure

The architecture of the 1900s to 1910s in the City of London was characterised by two themes that reflect broader British and European trends but were arguably particularly evident in the financial centre. Namely, office building size increased more dramatically than in the mid- to late-Victorian period and, at the same time, the degree of eclecticism and academically ‘incorrect’ usage of mixed historicist devices became somewhat more restrained. That said, especially in the earlier portion of the 1900s, there were still plenty of examples of abundance of sculptural detail.

With reference to the Edwardian period, it seems even harder to narrow the examples down to a couple of buildings, since the number of surviving works is considerable. Two outstanding examples (though far from famous and therefore consonant with our definition of ‘vernacular’) are the British Linen Bank and the Liverpool, London and Globe Insurance. Both date to the early 1900s and both are the offices of already well-established companies that felt the need for larger but also grander premises. We also selected these two examples as they were both designed by the prominent architect John Macvicar Anderson, which should help illustrate a degree of continuity from the work of the 1880s to 1890s.

*Liverpool, London and Globe Insurance, by J.M. Anderson (1905)*

The Liverpool, London and Globe Insurance was the result of a series of mergers in the industry and its offices occupy a prominent but difficult corner location with a sharply acute angle, at the western end of Cornhill. The challenge of satisfying programmatic utility and design image was met by fashioning a semi-circular apex element terminating in a cupola, while the side elevations adopt a straightforward rusticated-base / giant-order body. Those aspects are unified by the primary entablature and a recessed, balustraded attic storey wrapping around the entire edifice. Allegorical sculpture above the main entrance and a (still nicely preserved) ‘banking hall’ with rich marble treatment add to the Classical branding of the whole.

The British Linen Bank offices are built on an existing, prestigious location at the corner between Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate. The combination of sedate Neoclassical elements is a study in formality and proportions, and attains a sense of order despite abundant sculptural and ornamental elements. The alternating arrangement of the Corinthian order between the antae (coupled and single pilasters) and centre (engaged columns) creates rhythmicality, while the stacking of vertical elements relieves the strongly horizontal geometry of the building. Doorways are emphasised by marked framing and sculptural embellishment.

The cataclysmic impact of the First World War ultimately led to the questioning of many Edwardian cultural certitudes, including in the realm of the arts. Nonetheless, for much of the 1920s, what we witness in the City is continuity in the application of formal and even monumental Classicism to commercial buildings. This only partly reflected the completion of plans that had begun before the outbreak of hostilities. Some examples of very ‘Edwardian’ demonstrativeness and self-celebration in post-war architecture of the City include the Swiss Bank Corporation (1925), Hudson Bay House (1928) and the strikingly monumental Port of London Authority (1922). The latter’s design (1912) was approved before the Great War and executed afterwards.

*British Linen Bank, by J.M. Anderson (1903)*

By the 1930s, City commissions did begin to reflect more openly the emergence of Modernist architectural aspirations. Even then, within this geographic area, the genius loci retained strong links to Classical references, and what was generally built amounted to ‘stripped’, simplified (and at times stylised) forms of Classicism. This transitional style is recognisable not just by the paucity of applied decoration and simplified void-framing but also by the emergence of structuralist arrangements of the facades. Examples of this later expression of Classical themes include the Reuters Building (1934), Midland Bank (1924–39) and Scottish Widows (1934).

Conclusion

The interruption (and destruction) caused by the Second World War and subsequent wholesale acceptance of the Minimalist International style effectively brought the prolonged dominance of Classically inspired themes in City architecture to an end. Notwithstanding a small-scale revival of contemporary interest in Classical architecture, it seems unlikely that we will witness substantive additions to the City of London’s existing array of Neoclassical buildings and streetscapes.

The claim that, in the specific locale of the Square Mile, this broad family of styles constitutes a sort of vernacular architectural presence is certainly debatable but the contribution of the Classical language to the character of built space in the City is indisputable. At claxity.com, our goal is to document it and hopefully contribute to its preservation.

Luca Jellinek is a macroeconomist and urban/architectural historian based in London. His long career in the City of London combined with a fascination with lesser-known ‘quality’ architecture to inspire research into the buildings, designers and commissioning clients of the cityscape of the ‘Square Mile’. In particular, he has focused on the enduring appeal of Classical themes and symbolism for commercial clients and how that was implemented at the level of the street-wall.

Partial list of sources

Publications

Ken Allison, Architects and Architecture of London, Oxford: Architectural Press, 2008

Derek Avery, Victorian and Edwardian Architecture, London: Chaucer Press, 2003

Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner, Buildings of England – London 1: The City of London, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997

Jones Lang Wooton, Rebuilding London Offices, London: Jones Lang Wooton, 1954 & 1957

David Kinsaton, The City of London, vols. 1–4, London: Pimlico, 1995

Michael H. Port, Imperial London, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995

Albert Richardson, Monumental Classic Architecture in Great Britain and Ireland, New York: Dover Publications, 2001

John Summerson, The London Building World of the 1860s, London: Thames & Hudson, 1973

Archives

Aviva Group Archives

Builder (The) – online archives

Building News (The) – online archives

HSBC archives

Lloyds Group Archives

London Metropolitan Archives

RBS archives

RIBA archives

Westpac Group Archives

Is Neoclassicism the Vernacular Architecture of the City of London?

Post-War Designed Landscapes — ‘Elegant and Simple Solutions’ to ‘Down to Earth Problems’: The Landscape Architecture of Michael Brown and Preben Jakobsen

Post-War Designed Landscapes: Heritage Values and Forgotten Spaces