the world of private banking

LONDON’S FIRSt ‘BIG BANG’? 95
in other American railways, together with Brazilian, Canadian and Indian railway
companies, during the mid-century. 82
Victorians rather pompously decorated panels of the new Royal Exchange
Building of 1844 with romanticized paintings of the classical Phoenician Empire,
in an obvious allusion. This also reflected that overseas trade was still at the
heart of the City despite the edifice’s predecessor having housed a segment of
the Stock Exchange. Engagement with overseas trade was the learning school
for the provision of international credit that then acted as a sheet anchor for
the other, various businesses into which London mercantile houses moved and
diversified. The finance companies never had that stabilizing element, but instead
mostly emerged out of the desperate financial conundrum of mid-century railway
contracting, which proved to be their undoing.
VII
The City’s mid-century transformation was rounded out by the opening of
branches of foreign corporate banks. The first were established by Scottish jointstock
banks, beginning with the National Bank of Scotland in 1864. These were
followed by the City offices of continental European banks – the Crédit Lyonnais
and the Société Générale in 1871, and the Deutsche Bank in 1873. 83
The reordering of the City’s institutional structures was also accompanied by
changes in its built form. New institutions and expanding established enterprises
required suitable accommodation. In 1863 Kleinworts had built a new freehold
office in Mincing Lane in the favoured ‘commercial Italianate’ style that cost
£42,000. Specific commissions went along with speculative developments,
a feature of the City since the mid-1820s. One mid-1860s example is the City
Offices Company, promoted jointly by the Crédit Foncier and Mercantile Credit
in 1864. This real-estate company had options on sites in the vicinity of the Bank
of England ‘in places most suitable for offices, the present scarcity of and the
extraordinary demand for which are well known’.
Surviving physical evidence in the late 1990s of the City’s physical
transformation over the 1860s and 1870s include: National Bank (13–17 Old
Broad Street – 1861), National Provincial (15 Bishopsgate – 1864–5), both
employing Italian Renaissance conventions in their design, and the deliberately
less imposing building erected for F. Huth & Co. (11 Tokenhouse Yard – 1869–
71). The National Discount’s premises combined French and Cinquecento motifs
(33–5 Cornhill – 1857–8) and, unusually for the period, were the result of an
82
J. Wake, Kleinwort Benson: the History of Two Families in Banking (Oxford,
1997), pp. 91–5, 97–102.
83
H. Bonin, Société Générale in the United Kingdom (Paris, 1996); and L. Gall, ‘The
Deutsche Bank from its Founding to the Great War 1870–1914’, in L. Gall et al., The
Deutsche Bank (London, 1995), pp. 17–18.