Sound as a pound.

BUILDING THE BANK OF ENGLAND: MONEY, ARCHITECTURE, SOCIETY 1694-1942

By Daniel M. Abramson. London: Yale University Press. 2005. [pounds sterling]50

For an institution that spent its first 40 years renting buildings designed for other purposes, the Bank of England has an enviable architectural reputation. Daniel Abramson uses this ambiguity as a spur to an imaginative and wide-ranging investigation of the relationship between the institution and architecture that is not limited to the buildings it occupied or commissioned. He shows that decisions about what sort of buildings to occupy, as well as the private architectural proclivities of its directors, rank alongside the commissioning of purpose designed accommodation in revealing the essence of the bank and its role in economic, public and political life. Architecture was not just a physical means to functional ends; it helped to forge the bank's identity and position in national consciousness, as befits an institution that was inventing new forms of credit and financing that were increasingly taking the concept of money into ever more esoteric realms.

Founded in 1694 it revolutionised the relationship between government and wealth--essentially on the principle of lending its capital to the state in return for Parliamentary sanction and guarantee of the loan through taxation. When it commissioned its first building from George Sampson in 1733, it had already seen off competition from organisations like the South Sea Company as a manager of public debt, and proved its ability to finance Britain's wars more efficiently than other countries. As it evolved new spatial configurations and relationships to its context, it always turned fortuitous events to its advantage, even in the period where its evolution most closely coincided with 'canonic' architecture, Soane's long expansion of the bank as it grew to finance the Napoleonic Wars. At [pounds sterling]1.04bn it was four times greater than all previous eighteenth-century wars put together. But it was the death of a pedestrian caused by a falling statue dating from the time of Soane's predecessor Taylor that enabled Soane to argue successfully for the need to rebuild the perimeter wall, one of his most notable achievements.

For all his magnificent invention and sublime effects, Soane still relied on a form of Classicism that could evoke ruination, as Gandy's illustrations hint. Architecture and capitalism, as Abramson shows, are never in easy accord, and never more so than over Herbert Baker's rebuilding of Soane's work in the 1920s and '30s. Long considered extreme vandalism, Abramson is more balanced, explaining how Soane's work had become obsolete, and how Baker's limitations intensified the dim view he presented to the outside world. Such acute analysis runs through the book and helps, as Abramson aims, to show 'what architectural history can teach history' through one intense study.