1 Cockerell was most active working for the Bank of England in the 1830s and 40s, when he remodelled its public banking offices, fortifed its parapets during the Chartist Riots of 1848, and designed the well-known branch offices in Plymouth, Manchester, Liverpool, and Bristol. The standard biography of Cockerell is Watkin, David, The Life and Work ofC. R. Cockerell (London, 1974)Google Scholar.

2 Cockerell had access to such primary materials in the Bank as Committee of Building Minute Books dating back to 1760 (Bank of England Archive [hereafter BEA], M5/262-266, 744), Court of Directors Minutes (BEA, G4), Committee of Treasury Minutes (BEA, G8), and some of his predecessors’ architectural drawings in the collection of the Bank of England Museum and Sir John Soane’s Museum. Additionally, over forty secondary sources are cited in the text, including sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps and descriptions of the site, eighteenth-century guidebooks, and nineteenth-century periodicals.

In his research and writing, Cockerell was aided by John Francis (1811-82), a Bank official and historian, who provided information on the institution’s economic history and who also suggested various editorial changes. See Francis to Cockerell, 22 November 1858, Bank of England Museum (hereafter BEM), D-114; and rough notes referring to Cockerell’s manuscripts, attributed to Francis (BEM, 112). Francis probably also provided Cockerell with a nine-page outline of the building’s history by D. Ritchie dated 29 September 1856 (BEM, D-114).

Cockerell also received help from John E. Goodchild (1810-99), a longtime assistant, who transcribed pages from the early eighteenth-century tradesmen’s edition of Palladio (see note 10) which Cockerell believed had been used in the design of the first building. See Goodchild to Cockerell, 18 December 1858, BEM, D-i 14; and the transcribed ‘Preface to the First Book of Architecture by Andrea Palladio, Translated out of Italian’ (by Godfrey Richards), BEM, D-114. Goodchild’s obituary can be found in The Builder 86, no. 2937 (20 May 1899), 5°5.

There also survive eighteen sheets of notes and a rough draft of the text in Cockerell’s own hand (BEM, D-114). This bundle of material as well as the Francis and Goodchild memoranda were given to the Bank of England in 1930 by Cockerell’s granddaughter, Frances M. Noel, through the auspices of Herbert Baker, the Bank’s then-architect. See Noel to Baker, 1 May 1930; Baker to A. V. Alexander, 7 May 1930; Alexander to Baker, 20 May 1930; W. Marston Acres, ‘Papers of Charles Robert Cockerell’, 22 May 1930 (all material BEM, 114).

3 Various plans of the Bank of England and its vicinity, BEM, M50 (a i, iii-v, vii), M50 (b vi), and M57ii. Five of these plans were published for the first time in Acres’s, W. Marston The Bank of England From Within, 1694-1900, 2 vols (London, 1931)Google Scholar, though without explanation of their source in Cockerell’s project.

4 Watkin, Life and Work, p. xxi.

5 The ‘Architectural Progress’ reached the stage of a printed proof thirty-two quarto pages in length (BEM, D-51 and Bank of English Research Library). But this version is incomplete, taking the Bank’s history up only until the beginning of Soane’s tenure. The only full version of the text is found in eight, handwritten folio sheets (not in Cockerell’s hand) annotated by an anonymous editor (BEM, D-114, Part 2). This full manuscript is signed by Cockerell and dated December 1858.

6 Current literature on the Bank of England’s architecture and architects includes Binney, Marcus, ‘Sir Robert Taylor’s Bank of England’, Country Life 146, no. 3793-94 (13-20 November 1969), 1244–48, 1326-30Google Scholar; Binney, , Sir Robert Taylor: From Rococo to Neoclassicism (London, 1984)Google Scholar; Schumann-Bacia, Eva, John Soane und die Bank of England, 1788 bis 1833 (Hildesheim, 1990)Google Scholar; and, Schumann-Bacia, , John Soane and the Bank of England (New York, 1991)Google Scholar. Much of the material in this essay is based on the author’s doctoral thesis, ‘Money’s Architecture: The Building of the Bank of England, 1731—183 3’ (Harvard University, 1993). I am grateful to Neil Levine and Eric Rosenberg for commenting on a draft of this essay, to David Watkin for coming to the Bank of England to inspect the ‘Architectural Progress’, and to Elizabeth Ogborn and to the staff of the Bank’s Museum and Archive for various assistance.

7 The standard works on the general history of the Bank of England are Acres, Bank of England from Within and Clapham, John, The Bank of England: a History, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1944)Google Scholar. In Acres, chapters 25, 27, 47-48, 55, and 71 discuss the building’s history, while chapter 72 describes the Bank’s ‘Distinguished Visitors’. In 1835, the Bank’s Deputy Governor asked Soane to provide ‘the particulars of those parts of the Bank that so add to the interest generally felt by those who visit this Establishment by calling their attention to classical recollections.’ Letter from Timothy Abraham Curtis to John Soane, 11 August 1835, Soane’s Museum Archive, Personal Correspondence, 1.B.2.23. One of the visitors to the Bank in 1853 was Charlotte Bronte: Gaskell, Elizabeth, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (London, 1985), p. 493 Google Scholar.

8 See Watkin, Life and Work.

9 For the economic and social history of the City of London, its financial industry, and the Bank of England’s place in this context, see Dickson, P. G. M., The Financial Revolution in England: a Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Krey, Gary Stuart De, A Fractured Society: the Politics of London in the First Age of Party, 1688-1715 (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar; Rogers, Nicholas, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age ofWalpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar; and Stevenson, John (ed.), London in the Age of Reform (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar.

10 For the works of Morris and Richards that Sampson may have known see Morris, Robert, An Essay in Defense of Ancient Architecture (London, 1728)Google Scholar and Lectures on Architecture (London, 1734-36); and Palladio, Andrea, The First Book of Architecture, trans. Richards, Godfrey (London, first published in 1663)Google Scholar. For recent writing on Morris and Richards and various strains of neo-classicism see Harris, Eileen, British Architectural Books and Writers (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar; Wittkower, Rudolf, Palladio and Palladianism (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; and Friedman, Terry, ‘“Mr. lnigo Pilaster and Sir Christopher Cupolo”: On the Advantages of an Architectural Firago’, Architectural Heritage 1 (1990), 34–48 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Sampson see Colvin, Howard, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 (New York, 1980), pp. 711–12 Google Scholar.

11 For Soane’s remodelling of the Bank Stock Office see Summerson, John, ‘The Evolution of Soane’s Bank Stock Office in the Bank of England’, in The Unromantic Castle (London, 1990), pp. 143–56 Google Scholar, first published in Architectural History 27 (1984).

12 For theories of architectural character see Rowe, Colin, ‘Character and Composition; or some Vicissitudes of Architectural Vocabulary in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and other Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 59–87 Google Scholar; Egbert, Donald Drew, ‘Character’, in The Beaux-Arts Tradition in French Architecture (Princeton, 1980), pp. 121–38 Google Scholar; and Archer, John, ‘Expression and Affectivity: Theories of Character and Association’, in The Literature of British Domestic Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 46–56 Google Scholar. For the science of physiognomy see Wechsler, Judith, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in Nineteenth Century Paris (Chicago, 1982), p. 22ff Google Scholar.

13 Soane was Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy from 1806 to 1836, and Cockerell from 1840 to 1856. For Soane’s writing on character see the Lectures on Architecture (London, 1929), pp. 177-78, and for Cockerell’s see the synopses of his lectures in the Builder 1, 3-4 (1843, 1845-46), especially 3 (1845), 63. There were differences between Soane’s and Cockerell’s ideas about character. Cockerell adhered to the Vitruvian, anthropomorphic paradigm, while Soane proposed a more variegated, aesthetic unity. For a sympathetic evaluation of the character of Soane’s architecture using picturesque criteria see Leeds, W. H., ‘The Bank of England’, in Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London, ed. Pugin, A. and Britton, J., 2nd ed., vol. 2 (London, 1838), 54–73 Google Scholar.

14 The ongoing paradigm for the interpretation of Soane’s career was formulated in 1952 by Summerson’s, John essay Sir John Soane, 1753-1837 (London, 1952)Google Scholar, republished with revisions in John Soane (London, 1983), p. 9-23. But as far back as 1936 Soane was named a progenitor of Modernism by no less a figure than Gropius, Walter: The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (London, 1936), p. 112 Google Scholar.

15 Houblon (1632-1712) was the Bank’s first governor.

16 Cockerell had a number of plans and illustrations drawn up to accompany the ‘Architectural Progress’. See note 3 above for details.

17 Cockerell is referring to Godfrey Richards’s English edition of Palladio, first published in 1663. See note 10 above.

18 See note 10 above for the architectural theorist Robert Morris (c. 1702-54).

19 Cockerell compared Taylor’s Bank Court Room first apparently to a room by Stephen Wright in Clumber House, Notts., for the 2nd Duke of Newcastle (1768-78; see Colvin, Biographical Dictionary, p. 933) and then to Taylor’s own saloon in his house, 34 Spring Gardens, Whitehall (c. 1767; see Binney, Sir Robert Taylor, p. 59). Charles-Alexandre de Calonne (1734-1802) was Controller-General under Louis XVI from 1783 to 1787 and a patron of Ledoux among other architects. His remark about Taylor’s Bank was first reported in the latter’s obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 58(2), no. 4 (October 1788), 930-31.

20 Cockerell’s awkward sentence may be rephrased to mean that Taylor took the motif of the interlocking triumphal arches from Bramante’s Cortile Belvedere for the Bank’s new wings (Fig. 3), while from Palladio’s villas Taylor adapted the overall compositional idea of flanking a centre block with low, symmetrical extensions.

21 Taylor’s bequest founded Oxford University’s school of modern languages, the Taylorian Institution.

22 This remark raises a question regarding Cockerell’s exclusive authorship of the ‘Architectural Progress’. It may be that John Goodchild, Cockerell’s assistant, was responsible for some of the later parts containing architectural criticism. Another possibility is that the Bank official John Francis was the anonymous collaborator since a surviving memorandum calling for various editorial changes is most likely by him (see note 2 above). On the other hand, the text possesses an overall stylistic coherence that argues against joint authorship; moreover, the surviving notes and rough draft are all in Cockerell’s hand. Thus, in the absence of further corroborating evidence pointing to a second author, it still seems wisest to attribute the ‘Architectural Progress’ to Cockerell alone.

23 George Dance, jun. (1741-1825) and Robert Mylne (1733-1811) were architects like Soane with close professional ties to the City of London.

24 Cockerell succeeded Soane as architect to the Bank in 1833, and fortified the building’s parapets during the 1848 Chartist Riots.

25 In 1815, George Soane wrote a two-part article for the Champion magazine, critical of his father’s architecture: Dorothy Stroud, Sir John Soane, Architect (London, 1984), p. 100.

26 The ‘crowd of scholars’ who Cockerell says unwisely praised Soane’s unorthodoxies would probably include William Wilkins, George Basevi, William and Henry William Inwood, Robert Smirke, George Dance, and other architects associated with the Greek Revival.