Horace Field and Lloyds Bank

Abstract

In 1980, Andrew Saint told members of the Victorian Society that the Arts and Crafts architect Horace Field (1861-1948) was ‘frequently referred to but rarely discussed’. Thirty years later the situation is largely unchanged. Yet Field played an influential role in the architectural development of the twentieth-century English and Welsh high street. He was a significant figure in the process by which the architectural styles of bank premises were, by the late 1920s, transformed from ones very similar to those of commercial or municipal offices into a distinct and domestic interpretation of the style of Queen Anne. His contribution was two-fold: as the designer of a series of branches of Lloyds Bank, and as co-author (with his former assistant, Michael Bunney) of the widely read English Domestic Architecture of the XVII and XVIII Centuries, published in 1905.