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…