The Former Midland Bank Building - King Street



The top end of King Street is dominated by this monumental Portland stone buildings. It occupies an island site between Brown Street and Spring Gardens.  This was once the Midland Bank.  Below you can see two stone carvings on the building.  One includes the initials of Midland Bank and the other contains a bee hive logo of the bank.



The building was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in collaboration with Whinney, Son & Austen Hall. The design was completed in 1928 and building was finished in 1935.  Lutyens is known as the designer of the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London and for his collaborations with the gardener Gertrude Jekyll.

In recent years it has been home to HSBC but when the image below was taken, in August of 2009, it was empty and "TO LET".


The building has two angle porches in King Street. Pevsner describes it as, "a nearly square block and treated as such, with the upper motifs identical on all four sides."......"The banking hall could not be sky lit, so Lutyens gave it archading on all four sides and wooden galleries much as in Wren churches."



The images below, taken on October 26, 2010, show the Midland Bank swathed in scaffolding.  I believe that this is the beginning of the process of converting the building into apartments and a restaurant.






When I visited the site in October of 2011 the building was uncovered again and sparkling white.



















This notice was attached to the building:



When I returned in April of 2012, Jamie's was open for business.








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While Jamie's thrived downstairs in the Banking Hall, upstairs the rest of the building remained empty until work began to turn it into a hotel.  Accessed by way of a door on Spring Gardens, the upper floors are now home to the Hotel Gotham. (the images below were taken in November 2015)





It describes itself as, "... an imaginative bolthole having style and substance,  .... (with) a cheeky twist."  They add that they have, "... painstakingly restored an iconic building and brought playful references to the banking past.  In the bedrooms with moneybag-style laundry bags, in the restaurant with typewriters on the wall, and in the bar with upside down briefcases for light fittings.  It could be the sumptuous fabrics, geometric carpets or theatrical monochrome palette, mixing blacks with gold and greys that create a glitzy, plush, unapologetic Gotham."