GROCER GROSS..ER..

In my mind, the Grocer’s will always be a small shop in 1960s England which sells just about everything, wrapped in brown paper bags.  Some things were even sold by the gross, a dozen dozens.  Today of course, “gross” means the opposite of “awesome” or “cool”.  In the sixties we had “fab” and “grotty”.

150 years earlier, Soane was completing his North-West extension at the Bank of England: the green bit in our colour-coded time sequence.  This entailed taking land from the Grocers’ Hall garden and straightening Princes Street.  In the photo above I was standing at the edge of Princes Street, and in the middle of what used to be the garden of the Worshipful Company of Grocers … one time landlords to the fledgling Bank of England.

  Last weekend I discovered drawings, previously glossed over for a lobby connecting the new Discount Office to the Long Passage.  This junction-point in the passage is marked by a skylight that belongs to the floor above, visible through an oval hole in…

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