Building the Bank of England
Money, Architecture, Society, 1694-1942
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9799371 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Watkin (University of Cambridge, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 121 |
| Issue | 494 |
| Pages | 1479-1481 |
| Publication date | 2006-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The English Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ehr/cel308 |
| OpenAlex | W1969446417 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
THE author of this brilliant and comprehensive work is an architectural historian who has expanded his role by exploring the relation of architecture to capitalism. Nonetheless, despite his financial expertise, architectural history is the core of his work, with its 267 illustrations, mainly of architectural drawings, plans, and views. It is the complex story of the four principal architects responsible for the buildings of the Bank from 1734 to 1942: George Sampson, Sir Robert Taylor, Sir John Soane, and Sir Herbert Baker. Professor Abramson explains how, on a site equal in area to that of St Paul's Cathedral, they created a city within a city, ‘a warren of public halls and private offices, courtyards and gardens, warehouses and vaults, passages, and residential apartments’. Founded as a private corporation in 1694, it became the basis for Britain's eighteenth-century commercial revolution, encouraging industrial development and helping to achieve British supremacy over France by managing the national debt and financing major battles from Blenheim to Waterloo. Abramson sees this combination of responsibility for private commercial credit as well as for the national bullion repository, as a collaboration and compromise between commerce and aristocracy. In the world of Addison and Steele, unlike contemporary France, the public virtues of trade, private expenditure, and consumption were praised, with the man of commerce and probity seen as a model
Archaeology · Aristocracy (class · Bullion · Capitalism · Compromise · Corporation · Debt · Economic history · Economics · History of architecture · Management · Political science · Sociology · Architecture · Economic Theory and Policy · Finance · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,57 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2024 (13) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |