Marble columns, a glass dome, and a banking hall built to intimidate – now serving a three-pound pint to anybody who walks in
The Crosse Keys on Gracechurch Street holds a 4.2 from six thousand two hundred and forty-three people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and is a Wetherspoon.
It was built as a bank.
The room
Marble columns. A glass dome. Mosaic. A ceiling that goes up and up and up, and a floor area that a modern developer would fill with three storeys.
It was a banking hall, and everything about it was designed to do one thing: to make a person walking through the door feel small, and to make them believe that the institution taking their money was permanent.
That is what all of these buildings were for. We wrote about it at the Lobby Bar at One Aldwych, which was a newspaper office, and at Christopher’s, which was the first licensed casino in London.
The Victorians and Edwardians built commercial architecture as intimidation, and they were extremely good at it, and it worked.
What happened to it
Banking stopped needing rooms.
The counter, the clerk, the ledger, the hall – all of it was made redundant, first by the branch network and then by the computer and then by the phone in your pocket.
A building designed to hold four hundred people transacting business by hand is now, in commercial terms, a very expensive void with a listed ceiling.
So the banks left, and the great halls went to whoever could fill them – and the only businesses in Britain that can profitably fill a room that size are pub chains.
The inversion
And this is what we find genuinely remarkable and we are not being sarcastic.
A room built to exclude, to overawe, and to communicate that the people inside it were more important than the people outside it, is now a Wetherspoon.
Which means that anybody may walk in. Anybody at all. There is no doorman, no dress code, no minimum spend, and no requirement to buy anything within any particular timeframe.
A pensioner with a coffee may sit under that dome for three hours and nobody will move them on.
We made this argument at the Central Bar in Shepherd’s Bush and we will make it again: the Wetherspoon estate is one of the last categories of indoor space in this country where a person may simply exist without spending money, and it is rated lower than a cocktail bar that has served twenty-two people, and the metric is wrong rather than the pub.
Verdict
The Crosse Keys, and the keys
The name is not the bank’s. It is much older, and we have met it before.
Two crossed keys are the arms of Saint Peter and the emblem of the Papacy – and we wrote about this at the Cross Keys on Endell Street, and noted that England conducted one of the most violent religious revolutions in European history and could not be bothered to repaint the pub signs.
The Crosse Keys was a great coaching inn on this site, and it is mentioned in the sixteenth century, and it was one of the London inns whose galleried yard was used as a theatre before the playhouses were built.
An inn yard, then a bank, now a Wetherspoon. The building keeps changing. The name has not moved in four hundred years.
Verdict
Go. Look up. Stand in the middle of a banking hall built to make you feel small, holding a three-pound pint, and enjoy the fact that the bank is gone and you are still here.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The thing about politicians complaining about it is they’re upset it’s made institutional dysfunction impossible to deny even within institutional settings.
Before getting. Shouty.