Do you know what this logo is?
By: Suse Steed
Tags: British Empire, Economics, History, Banking, Guns

Do you know what this logo is?

This is the first post in a series where I am sharing a walking tour I used to do about the British Empire. This is stop 1 of 8. You can read why I accidentally started doing them here ).

I would start my walking tour of the British Empire at Bank Station. I’d often show people this logo. Very few people can identify it. Do you know what it is?

I try very hard to give people clues. I mention that we are at Bank Station. And that Bank Station is named after a Bank. That we are standing outside of the Bank it is named after.

Can you name this building? (It’s the Bank of England)

Most people aren’t able to identify it. They usually get that it is a bank, but very few people get that it is the Bank of England.

You might think that, given the Bank of England controls the money in everyone’s wallet, people might know more about them. Nope.

Here is a picture of me outside the Bank of England Museum. Sorry it’s not more exciting. You can see the logo hopefully.

Most people can identify that the lady in the logo is Britannia. She is the symbol of the British Empire. But most people don’t associate her at all with banking — but they should — because banking and Britannia went hand in hand. This logo is a pretty clear example of that. It was designed when the Bank of England was founded, in 1694, and hasn’t been changed since.

Here is Britannia on another coin, note the ships in the background.

You will see Britannia in the same pose on many of our coins, but often with ships in the background. On the Bank of England logo she just has a stack of cash. This is important. Because the Bank of England raised money to lend to the King. The King spent that on building up the British navy. This first logo shows the pile of cash sowed the seeds to so many of our future wars.

It is well known that when the Bank of England was founded so too was our national debt. But few people point out what that debt was spent on. Warships. Britain was one of the first nations to figure out how to use debt to raise money for war. In many ways the Bank of England set the course of our history.

The Bank of England moved to a building on this site on Threadneedle Street in 1734. It began it’s life in a much smaller pad. It started off using the office space of the Mercers Company. The Mercers are one of the very very very old trading organisations of the City of London (they are old. very old). Many important organisations used their office, not just the Bank of England, but also the East India Company (more on them later). Perhaps this is an early example of hot desking and coworking.

Another picture of the Bank of England. You probably got the general idea.

It’s important that it was the Bank of England that raised finance for war. We always think that government is the one that has funded all our wars. But the Bank of England, then a private institution, came before parliament worked in any way like it does today. Decisions about wars were much more to do with the whims of the king. This was a time when wars were much more explicitly about getting access to trade and resources. Over time more of the conflicts of the empire began to be sold to the public to be about morality although when you look closer you see much of the same thing.

I’ve started this tour here because I’d like you to consider the link between war and the economy that most people fail, ever, to see. Most of us are able to ignore this relationship because the guns that they finance are not very often pointed at us.

The Bank of England wasn’t the only bank involved in war financing, or in funding violence. Britain was at the centre of the arms trade, has been for centuries, and still is today. Priya Satia goes into this in her book ‘Empire of Guns’. One of the things she points out is that despite our success in getting our guns into the hands of people all round the world, we’ve managed to outlaw their sale over here. So the violence unleashed by this industry stays far away, we can stay unaware of it.

There she is.

Britannia is going to come up quite a few times on the tour, so we’ll meet her again. She has also been on many coins since the Bank of England was founded, most recently on the 50p. Here is she is with a lion, that native species of Britain, that has also become one of our national symbols.

Is this too many coins now? Sorry. Here is a Roman coin. I’ve got loads more I’d like to show you.

In fact she was even on Roman coins, but that’s another story, we’ve already got a lot to cover. Let’s cross over the road to the Royal Exchange - I’ll see you there.

(I mean, I won’t, but you can read my next post here).