‘Safe as the Bank of England.’ So goes the old phrase. And yes, with walls 8ft thick, the Old Lady is pretty impregnable. Even the keys to her vaults are more than a foot long (the locks also now incorporate voice-activated software). Until 1973 the building was guarded at night by soldiers from the Brigade of Guards, who received a pint of beer with their dinner there. With all this security, how can you hope to get in?
One answer came in 1836, when the directors received an anonymous letter inviting them to meet the letter writer in the bullion room late one night. At the agreed hour they heard some floorboards being dislodged, and looked down to see a man’s head appearing. He worked in the sewers, and had calculated that a drain ran directly underneath the vault. The Bank rewarded him £800 — worth around eighty grand today, but still not as much as he could have got by nicking all the gold. That’s the gold, by the way, that can only be stacked six pallets high — otherwise it would sink into the clay bedrock on which the Bank is built.
Best to assume this drain has been blocked, so what are your options? Every autumn there’s Open House, the weekend when famous London buildings welcome public visitors. I went during Mervyn King’s governorship. On his desk sat a cricket ball with which he’d taken five wickets for the Bank. (Sadly ‘Merv the Swerve’ was a spinner rather than a swing bowler.) Or you could visit the wonderful museum in the Bank’s south-east corner (open Monday to Friday, free entry). There are old white fivers, a real gold bar — you have to try and pick it up with one hand — and a signed first edition of The Wind in the Willows, whose author Kenneth Grahame worked at the Bank for 30 years.
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