Old Lady shows her medals
WHEN I came to the City you could keep out of the rain by taking a short cut through the Bank of England. Stride in through the double doors at Princes Street, over the mosaic of Montagu Norman as Janus facing both ways, past the Garden Court and the main gate and the rather odd statue of William III in a Roman kilt, and you were out in Bartholomew Lane, home and dry. Gone are such relaxed times, and the Bank's doors on Bartholomew Lane have long since remained barred and bolted. On Monday, with a pleasing sym- bolism, the Bank will throw them open welcoming us into its new museum. We can come to see some of the Bank's treasure. The Old Lady is showing her medals — her charter, her silver (not the gold, which stays safe in the vaults), her notes, a whole banking hall painstakingly rebuilt to the original designs of Soane, but also a whole battery of space-invader machines to ex- plain the contemporary Bank in action. Continuity runs deep here. 'The Bank', says Philip Warland, who runs its information division, 'has a duty as a public institution to define itself in the context of its history. Where we've come from determines who we are.' I hope that, across the way in the Mansion House, the new Lord Mayor was listening. The City fathers made precisely the wrong kind of exhibition of themselves with their riverborne pageant, which last summer ran £300,000 over budget and has now cost the City's publicity advisers their account. Candidates to take it over should argue that the duty to define and explain runs across the City, and certainly does not stop at the Mansion House steps. Now the Corporation must make its own effort to open the City's doors.
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