Crosse Keys, City of London

Grade II listing:- Former bank and office bock. 1919-13 by W. Campbell-Jones for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation; built by Trollope & and Colls. Steel frame construction faced with Portland stone, chanelled and rusticated on alternate bands at ground floor level.

Awkward rhomboid site cleverly made to appear rectangular. four storeys, attic and basement. Seven bays. Symmetrical facade in French Baroque/Beaux Arts banner. Tall ground floor with central round-arched entrance flanked by architraved square-headed windows and then round-arches to each end bay (that to left being the entrance to Bell Yard); all with exaggerated keystones having huge foliar enriched consoles; central consoles with cartouche. Plain band at first floor level from which ionic pilasters with swags, paired at penultimate bays, rise through three floors to support the entablature having sections of architrave only over the pilasters and projecting bracketed cornice. Attic set back with huge consoles on line of each pilaster separating the bays. Fine metal framed Crittall windows having complex margin glazing to ground floor and upper floors with thin transoms and mullions and patterned small panes. Second floor has enriched spandrel panels with cartouches (originally bearing in Chinese characters the names of the five principal Chinese towns) enclosed within square heads, flanked by floral drops. Third floor spandrel panels of bay leaf bands. Metal basement grilles and wreathed grilles to entrance arches by The Bromsgrove Guild.

Interior features of interest include sumptuous banking hall filling the entire ground floor with marble, tile and mosaic work by Art Pavements & Decorations Ltd; walls lined with American cipollino, dado of green Swedish marble with buff marble rail. Structural stanchions appear as doric columns encased in blue Ardennes marble supporting a good, richly decorated low relief plasterwork panelled ceiling with shallow domes having patterned glazing and providing top lighting. At the far end of the hall is a screen of marble ionic columns at ground floor level supporting a white pentelic marble open work balustrade bearing in the centre a good sculptured group of three Chinese boys.

Main rooms retain polished hardwood doors and panelling of Australian silkwood and Italian walnut; one room believed to retain an Adam fireplace. Original banking hall floor of mosaic, believed to exist beneath false floor. Some late C20 partitioning and a mezzanine floor inserted. Although built to reflect the importance of the bank, it was also intended that the corporation would occupy only the lower storeys and let the offices above to recoup costs. It was required to be built as speedily as possible taking just over one year.