Walk through the City

led by Paul Waite

This was a walk of a few buildings but we saw them from ceiling to basement. Starting on the roof of the new Coq d’Argent restaurant we had a perfect view of the skyline of the Midland Bank Headquarters. Then Midland opened up every part of their building from the staff canteen – with a rooftop view of Baker’s Bank of England – to the chairman’s office to the sage deposit plus almost all the staircases in between showing how perfectly preserved it is. We moved on to the Leadenhall Street branch which showed his clever use of light wells on a building with only one street frontage. After a picnic lunch the huge frontages of the BP building loomed and we saw a building sympathetically, but totally, transformed in the 1980s. Midland, now HSBC, and BP are both very proud of their Lutyens heritage and deserve an enormous amount of credit for keeping the buildings in such style and for allowing the group such wide access.