7 Highlights Of The Bank Of England Museum

London is, of course, full of brilliant, often free, museums. You can read all my blog posts on London museums/exhibitions here. I recently went to the Bank of England Museum for the first time in years.

Commerce, trade and finance are all so integral to the story of London and this is a great museum for getting to grips with that. Read on for my 7 highlights of what you can see there.

A Short History of the Bank of England

The Bank of England is one of the oldest and most prestigious central banks in the world. It was established in 1694 as a private enterprise to loan money to the government for their wars with France. The King and Queen (William III and Mary) were two of the original stockholders.

It was first located in the Mercer’s Hall on Cheapside and moved to its current location on Threadneedle Street in 1734. The bank is affectionately nicknamed the ‘old lady of Threadneedle Street’. 

Although its activities had always been determined by government legislation, it was not properly nationalised until 1946.

Its mission statement today is ‘Promoting the good of the people of the United Kingdom by maintaining monetary and financial stability’ by setting interest rates, issuing banknotes, regulating the banking sector and managing the country’s foreign exchange reserves. How they do this is explained in helpful layman’s terms in the museum.

The Building

In 1788 Sir John Soane was appointed as architect to the bank. He doubled the bank’s size and in 1828 enclosed it with an exterior, windowless wall. 

Between 1925 and 1939 the bank was redesigned again when further capacity was required. The entire interior section of Soane’s bank was demolished and rebuilt, to the designs of Sir Herbert Baker.

Only Soane’s exterior wall was kept, which you can still see today. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described this as the ‘greatest architectural crime of the 20th century in the City of London’. 

The inside of the Bank of England museum is designed however to look like the interior of Soane’s bank, to give you a sense of how it would have felt inside.

Other than the architecture, here are my seven other highlights/things to look out for!

1. The Etymology of ‘Carat’ and Roman gold

I very much enjoyed learning that the word ‘carat’ comes from the Greek word for carob seeds, ‘kerátion’. The seeds of the carob tree were used, in ancient times, to weigh gold and gemstones as they were perfectly even in weight. 

You can also see some old rare Roman gold bars dating from 375AD.

These were due to be melted down for coinage but were buried as part of a hoard in Hungary. For whatever reason the owner never collected them and the hoard was discovered in 1887.

They have the stamps of the mint at Sirmium (modern-day Sremska Mitrovica, 55 km west of Belgrade), one of the most important cities of the Roman Empire.

2. Tally stick

You see many items related to how the bank has lent money over the years. An early system was known as a ‘tally stick’.

It is a hazelwood stick with a series of notches in it. The number of notches represents the total debt. The tally stick was then split lengthways down the middle, the bank would keep one half and the government, to whom the bank was lending the money, kept the other half. I love how brilliantly simple the system was to begin with.

3. Coinage and notes through the ages

They also have various bank notes and coins through the centuries. Above is the earliest £5 bank note issued by the bank.

The Bank of England started issuing £5 notes in April 1793 when a panic over the start of the war with the French revolutionary government led to a shortage of circulating cash. 

4. Recruitment Brochure from the 1960s

Separate brochures were distributed targeting men and women. Men were promised expertise and travel, whereas women were promised good company. 

It depicts a frolicking lady in the centre, presumably on the way to her day at the bank (I enjoy that they have used exactly the same image just slightly smaller on the other side).

The brochure says ‘Don’t be overawed. For the bright young girl, the opportunities are really good’. ‘It’s full of nice people with young ideas’. 

For the graded staff and punch operator jobs, if you started at 16, you would receive £585 a year to begin with. By 25 you could be earning £935 a year and ‘even without promotion’ you could eventually reach £1170 a year. 

5. Secret Marks

Over the years ‘secret mark’s have been used on bank notes that look like printing/engraving errors, such as a line a bit longer than it should be or a stray dot. They were however a way of identifying fake notes as the counterfeiter was likely to omit them.  

6. The Gold Bar

Probably the best known item in the Bank of England museum is the genuine gold bar that you can lift in your hand. 

It is, I can confirm, surprisingly heavy. It weighs about 12.5kg and is worth roughly £380,000.

The Bank of England vaults hold the second largest gold reserve in the world (top is the New York Federal Reserve), containing 400,000 gold bars worth roughly £200 billion. The bank keeps the store on behalf of HM Treasury, other governments and central banks around the world.

The gold has to be stored in nine separate vaults over the whole surface area of the bank as London is built on clay and would more or less sink the bank if all in one room.

Slavery and the Bank

They currently have an interesting exhibition on focussing on the Bank of England and the City’s links with slavery. 

One of the main elements of this is how in 1774 the Bank as a creditor came into possession of two sugar plantations, worked by slaves, when a company called Alexander and Sons went bankrupt. The names of the 599 men and women that were enslaved there in 178 are displayed. 

The exhibition is on until February 2024, find out more about it here. 

The museum is open 10am-5pm Monday-Friday and until 8pm every third Thursday. Find out more about visiting here.

Thank you very much for reading- more London history below!