Review

Culture

Economics

Trust

21 November 2025

5 min read

Money’s hidden meanings in a contactless age

The Bank of England Museum reveals the symbolism, morality and power woven into the history of money

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

The Bank of England vaults.

Bank of England.

Our era of contactless payments obscures the symbolism once lavished on money. But the rich history of meaning, morality and power, layered into everyday transactions, is uncovered at an exhibition at the Bank of England Museum

Building the Bank celebrates 100 years of the current Bank of England building, on the site of Sir John Soane’s original structure, completed in 1827. Surveying a century makes past practices seem quaint: until 1973 the institution was guarded by the Bank Piquet military guard. A 1961 photo shows 12 Guardsmen with bearskin hats and bayonets, together with a drummer or piper, a sergeant and an officer, marching into the Threadneedle Streer entrance. Even now, when the wealth of most people in developed countries is contained in data warehouses, 400,000 gold bars are held in vaults deep beneath the Bank.

Faiths have grappled with money’s impact for millennia. Christianity’s relationship with money is tinged with unease, as St Paul’s oft misquoted letter to Timothy illustrates: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Personally, the immobilising feeling of envy, particularly if it is towards friends, does feel exactly like being pierced with blinding toxicity.

Contrastingly, in Hinduism pursuing wealth is one of four pillars of faith, called Artha. In Hinduism attempting to attain material wealth is part of attempting to attain salvation.

Herbert Baker, architect of the Bank of England, embodies moral ambiguity around faith and money. Buried in Westminster Abbey, and architect of Church House next door, Baker established his reputation working for Cecil Rhodes, prime minister of the Cape Colony 1890- 96. Vicar’s son Rhodes is now seen as paving the way for apartheid in southern Africa, and imposing an economically exploitive, racist, and imperialist system on the region. Baker also worked with better- known Edwin Lutyens on government buildings in New Delhi from 1912, declaring of the British Raj’s new seat of power “it must not be Indian, nor English, nor Roman, but it must be Imperial”.

After World War One, Soane’s bank was too small to house the increased staff numbers needed to service the ballooning national debt and financial complexity of the Roaring Twenties. Bordered by major roads at the heart of the City of London, the institution’s footprint could not expand, so Herbert created a design incorporating some of Soane’s classical aspects, but with floors at a greater depth and height than its processor.

From grand gestures to tiny details, classical mythology is a key element of the Bank’s design. Sculptor Charles Wheeler modelled doorknobs showing the face of Mercury. Mercury is the patron deity of finance and communication. Tiles for an officials’ lunchroom show a caduceus, with two bright blue snakes, tails entwined, framing Mercury’s face. Caducei are the symbol of commerce, representing reciprocity and mutually beneficial transactions.

Forty caryatids, the classical female form used in place of a pillar in Greek architecture, were salvaged from Soane’s building and reused. Some caryatids are in the area where old banknotes can be exchanged, besides the museum, now the only part of the Bank open to the public.

Outside, on the dome at the northwest corner of the bank, a gilt bronze statue of Ariel, named after the spirit of the air in The Tempest, represents “the dynamic spirit of the Bank which carries Credit and Trust over the wide world.”

The image of banks as depositories of trust and positive relationships took a pasting worldwide during the 2008 Credit Crisis and lean years that followed. But in 2015 former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, argues that banking services are a key part of functioning communities, and banks should be able to put people before profit. “At the heart of both these expectations is the value of the person as sacred, and all other things as secondary to human dignity. It is a value rooted in many faiths and especially in our Judaeo-Christian tradition. Of course profits have to be made, but they need to be measured not only in terms of their absolute return on capital employed, but also in terms of the human cost of achieving that return.

“Large institutions with adequate balance sheets working to maximise returns from those who can most afford it do not produce a sustainable society in the long term. Such an approach is narrow-minded and short-termist, because sustainable societies are essential to the large companies within them. It is also an immoral approach.”

Mosaics created by Boris Anrep idealise the Bank’ of England’s sunnier intentions towards the wider community. Anrep also designed mosaics for Westminster Cathedral, Tate Britain and the National Gallery. For the Bank, a tiny coin from the reign of Henry VIII known as the George Noble, the first time St George and the dragon appeared on English coinage, was magnified into a roundel showing the galloping saint, visor up, lancing the prostate dragon at the base. The George Noble was one of 50 designs, based on advances in coinage, gracing the Bank’s corridors.

At the main entrance, a mosaic showing a pillar, representing the Bank, is guarded by two lions, referencing the sculpture from Mycenae. The Bank’s global role, and place at the centre of the then British Empire is shown by the constellations of the Plough and Southern Cross, representing the southern and northern hemispheres.

An image of the Empire Clock Baker made for the Bank, - now disassembled - shows an ornate dial, marked in 24 sections, with the sun representing India and an anchor symbolising the port cities of Singapore and Hong Kong.

In 1946 the Bank of England was nationalised, formalising its role as a public institution, operating in a post war decolonialising world, totally different to the one its building had been designed for just 20 years before.

Systems and symbols around money mutate with the times. Money’s intangibility in our time of app and tap payment, makes its power less distinct than in the days of gold sovereigns. But we fool ourselves if we say money is unimportant, because all of history says otherwise.

Building the Bank, Bank of England Museum, until 2026

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Article

Comment

Economics

Nationalism

Politics

25 September 2025

4 min read

Millions of children go hungry in a country that dares to call itself godly

The gospel of national greatness is less about grace and more about political grit

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A sand drawing shows an unhappy child's face with the tide coming in from below

A sand drawing for a child poverty campaign.

Barnardos.

If anything, the UK – and more specifically England – is becoming a Christian country again. But not necessarily in a good way. The rise of Christian nationalism mirrors the American experience, with Christian symbols such as the cross weaponised against asylum seekers and the knuckle-draggers under them, marching as to war.

But there are still many non-belligerents who would stake a claim to our Christian nationhood. Wiser counsels such as the historian Tom Holland. Or Danny Kruger MP, who spoke to a near-empty chamber in parliament recently, before defecting from the Conservatives to Reform UK, about a Christian restoration, envisioning a "re-founding of this nation on the teachings that Alfred made the basis of the common law of England." He may need to explain that slowly to Nigel Farage.

But by what measure do we claim to be a Christian country? Here’s one: Child poverty. It’s very hard to make a case for a state being foundationally Christian in principle if significant numbers of its children go hungry. And the UK shamefully ranks among the worst of the world’s richest countries in this regard, with our children’s poverty rates rising by 20 per cent over the past decade – defined as those living in a household with less than 60 per cent of the national median income, so currently less than about £19,000 a year.

That’s some 4.5 million living in poverty, or 9 in a typical classroom of 30. Unless action is taken the number will push five million by 2030. Anecdotal evidence from teachers is truly shocking. Children arrive hungry at school with empty lunchboxes to fill and feed family at home. The UK ranks below poorer countries such as Poland and Slovenia, which are currently cutting their child-poverty rates, and well ahead of other wealthy nations such as Finland and Denmark.

It’s a national disgrace. Christologically, it also fails the minimum threshold for a nation that supposedly holds that the kingdom of heaven belongs to children. In damp and sub-standard housing this winter, lacking nutritious diet and prone to ill-health, heaven will have to wait for these British children.

The same gospel tells us that the poor are always with us, which may make us resigned to it. But political complacency won’t do. If there is always relative poverty against great riches, then the true measure must be what we’re trying to do about it. The damning answer to that seems to be very little.

It’s actually worse than that. The circumstance is one of our own deliberate, political making, exacerbated by the then chancellor George Osborne, who introduced the two-child benefit cap in 2017. That limited benefit payments for families claiming Child Tax Credit or Universal Credit for more than two children. It was part of Osborne’s pantomime wicked-squire act, as he repeatedly told us with a straight face that “we’re all in this together”. It was also borderline eugenics, because one of its effects was to limit the breeding of “lower orders”, the benefit cap disproportionately hitting the budgets of working and ethnic-minority families.

With Osborne’s selective austerity and social-engineering drive long gone, it’s well past time for a Labour government to do something to rectify such social injustice. Current chancellor Rachel Reeves must abolish the two-child benefit cap in her November Budget. With other welfare cuts prevented by Labour’s summer backbench rebellion, the question inevitably squawked by right-wingers is how that will be paid for.

Opposition parties relish the prospect of Reeves welching on pre-election promises not to raise taxes on working families. And abolishing the two-child welfare cap could cost £3.5 billion a year.

There are creative ways and means. Veteran chancellor and former prime minister Gordon Brown – the unsung hero of the 2008 worldwide financial meltdown, without whom we wouldn’t have an economy to do anything with – proposes fairly taxing the excess profits of the £11.5 billion gambling industry, which enjoys VAT exemptions and pays just 21 per cent tax, compared with 35-57 per cent in other industrialised countries. And if more money is needed then remove some of the interest-rate subsidy enjoyed by commercial banks when they deposit money at the Bank of England. That is what social justice looks like (gambling also costs the NHS £1 billion-plus in harms, so it’s time for the industry to pay up).

That points to some fiscal answers. There are other actions that must be taken this autumn, at political conferences and on any platform available to those with a public voice and conscience. It’s good to see Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York and stand-in primate of England in the absence of Canterbury, laying into the two-child limit and benefit cap.

Both Cottrell and Brown tell heart-breaking stories of children’s poverty in the UK. We must fight it and ensure that Reeves’ forthcoming Budget does so. As the children’s commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza said recently that millions of children are living in “almost Dickensian levels of poverty”. The irony is that in Dickens’ time we were called a Christian country.

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