Forget monetary policy, the Bank of England’s greatest crime was architectural

In 1916 the Bank of England committed what Nikolaus Pevsner was to call the greatest architectural crime to befall London in the 20th century. It decided to demolish much of its own building, designed by the great Georgian neoclassical architect John Soane.

Soane’s lost masterpiece is the subject of the latest series from the essential architecture podcast About Buildings and Cities. The podcast, started in 2016 by presenters Luke Jones and George Gingell as a hobby, has slowly become a fan-funded staple for architects, offering a re-evaluation of the received wisdoms about the canon and some affable banter along the way.

Soane worked on the Bank of England for almost 50 years. And the job provides the keystone to a sweeping look at the arc of his career. Even while still in training Soane had a thirst to prove himself with ‘banger megalomaniac student projects’, namely his over-elaborate ‘Triumphal Bridge’, which showed off his mastery of the classical idiom. Then there’s the familiar hustling: as a bricklayer’s son he juggled scholarships, jobs and opportunistic freelance commissions to fund his education and Grand Tour.

As practitioners rather than historians, both Jones and Gingell are attuned to the mundanities of architectural practice that are vital to make sense of Soane’s career. Too often these are glossed over by academia, or by an architect’s own heroic narratives (Soane, like all great architects, was a studious self-promoter). They reveal how Soane honed his craft in even the ‘least interesting early career projects’ including his idiosyncratic but inventive reinterpretations of ancient Greek architecture. Google, for example, his dairy for Hamels Park which has a portico, albeit with a thatched roof and unhewn tree trunks in place of Doric columns (an architect’s inside joke about the supposed timber origins of the classical order).