Building Confidence

My mum has just given up driving, and my couple of days in Dorset gave her the chance to do a series of small jobs which would have taken ages to achieve otherwise. One of these was going to Wimborne to visit the bank. She used to use the branch of Barclays in Winton but since my sister moved to Wimborne it's been more convenient for her to go there. Not any more, though: Barclays (Wimborne branch) closes at the end of the month. In common with the great majority of urban businesses, the bank only rents the building (I wonder who owns it? A pension fund, very likely) and a decline in real-world custom means the three-storey structure now houses half-a-dozen staff rather than the thirty-plus it used to. It isn't worth it.

I looked around at the small-town solidity of the Square. The great King's Head, grandest (if not the most venerable) of Wimborne's inns still closes off the west side, but grander still are the banks. On the north is the Italianate fabric of the Wilts & Dorset Bank of 1872, later Lloyds and finally TSB. Facing it was the even more elaborate Baroque building of the London Joint City & Midland, later just Midland and eventually HSBC, originally built in 1920: it has gigantic arched windows and its entrance is positively intimidating, strangely incongruous for the clothes store it now houses. Compared to these, in fact, Barclays isn't that impressive physically: the Crown Hotel which used to stand on its site was rebuilt in red brick in 1980 to form Crown Court. The architects still chose to put a range of arches on the ground floor, though: I don't know whether they knew that Barclays was going to be housed in the new building and so chose to give it a more bank-like appearance than the homely structure that stood there before. NatWest survives round the corner in West Borough, a humbler building converted from a house in about 1900, but with a banking hall added to it in grandiose Classical style - Venetian windows, a balustraded parapet, v-jointed columns and a big square doorway. It's a house made to look like a bank.

It looks like a bank because when the first regional banks began to infiltrate into mid-Victorian towns they wanted to make the point that they were trustworthy, and so they replaced the standard town houses they would originally have inhabited with structures that spoke of prosperity and reliability. In Wimborne the Wilts & Dorset was first off the mark, and then the others competed with it not just for business but architecturally. 

Today that kind of statement doesn't mean anything, and the tide of commerce retreats from the real-world environment of small towns like Wimborne. Grand bank buildings are inhabited, more or less comfortably, by cafés and clothes stores, and I wonder how long even they will manage. Deeper still, the townscape is no longer a landscape of power, nor does its physical appearance express anything about the relationships that actually control its life and experience: power lies elsewhere now.