Bank account

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1997 by Penny McGuire

Bank in Aldwych, on the fringe of Covent Garden, is the latest big restaurant to have opened during the past five years in the centre of London. Like its predecessors - including The Avenue (AR October 1996) and The People's Palace (AR September 1995) - it seats over 200 people at a time, swelling the already huge numbers of people now regularly eating out in London. You wonder where they all used to go for food and glamour.

Bank is also the latest restaurant to be designed by Wickham & Associates, following the cafe and restaurant designed for the fifth floor of Harvey Nichols (AR July 1993). It occupies the ground floor and part of the basement of a 1914 steel-framed building on the western half of the Aldwych crescent. Bisected by the Kingsway thoroughfare rushing northwards, the crescent sweeps around the Neo-Classical bulk of Bush House. The rear north side of the restaurant meets Kean Street, set at a higher level and bordered by the fine facade of Aram Designs' showroom. Wickham has made both prospects part of the design of the restaurant.

Like Rick Mather, architect of The Avenue, Wickham was originally faced with making sense of an amorphous high-ceilinged space that was once a banking hall. The obvious arrangement, adopted in both cases, was to install a cloakroom and bar next to the entrance, and the big dining room at the rear. But whereas Mather has made much of a rectangular front-of-house with a long bar, Bank's weird plan, shaped like an irregular and angular hourglass, suggested the insertion of a linear kitchen down the middle. Containing apparently the biggest single unit ever made (Wickham enjoys such statistics), it connects the two spaces at either end yet separates their different purposes. On one side it runs smoothly into a semi-circular bar, and on the other, the restaurant's service station. Gleaming, stylish and busy, the kitchen is screened by a glass wall and open to inspection as you walk down its length to the restaurant. This is somewhat reminiscent of Ron Arad's kitchens at Belgo (AR July 1995). But Bank's public kitchen is for the final preparation of food; more fundamental operations as well as refrigeration and storage take place in air-conditioned cellars downstairs.

All big restaurants are noisy - this is not something that seems to worry the restaurateurs who want a buzz, or the French, whose big dining rooms have provided a model and who know how to behave in restaurants. Wickham's attention to servicing the place has ensured an otherwise comfortable ambiance, both for the customers and more unusually for the kitchen staff.

Wickham's originality as an architect continually spills over the boundaries of Modernism with which he was brought up. Capable of architectonic drama, he habitually displays an appealing child-like pleasure in graphic shapes and has a catholic attitude to material and colour. This interior is his most exuberantly decorative so far; composed of coloured walls and columns, a shimmering stalactitic ceiling and playful furniture, it yet has industrial ruggedness. This is not a sleek scheme. The huge horizontal chandelier spreading across the ceiling, composed of greenish glass fins shaped individually and numbered, is undoubtedly an industrial object; but within the composition it has lyrical power. Reflected in mirrored walls and invisibly illuminated, the 3-d mass of glass (over 20 tons altogether) changes in depth, texture, colour and light as it stretches away from you, like the underside of a glacier. Melting and distorting the tops of columns, it has the curious effect from a distance of dispelling solidity and making the columns seem insubstantial.

On entering, you hardly notice anything other than this greeny gold glass ceiling (cleaned daily), except possibly the yellow and red columns, but gradually you register the Wickham trademarks: the sinuous bar, the toy-like chairs and bar stools with coloured cut-out frames seen in earlier schemes - the Kensington Place restaurant and Harvey Nichols' cafe. Other details intrude, like the coloured mosaics, grouted in opposing colours, used for the walls of lavatories downstairs; the elegance of the revolving door at the entrance; and the use of rough, granite paviours here, like the pavement outside, instead of the polished ones beloved by the corporate bank. Polished granite has been reserved for the bottom shaped seat set into unpolished granite near the public telephone. Such surreal resonances are characteristic. The oddity is the suddenly modest transition between the crystalline glamour upstairs and the subterranean intricacies, for the stairs like a sauna are lined with wooden planks.

Typically Wickham works to the edge of the site: diners eating next to the big glazed wall separating Kensington Place from the street, for instance, feel part of pavement life to a degree that can be disconcerting; at Bank sitting in the bar beside the huge panes of glass that form the facade onto Aldwych, you feel barely divided from the people and buses outside. The underwater, fishtank atmosphere of the place (one of the clients is a fish dealer) is reinforced in the dining room where the ground level is elevated and passers-by in Kean Street have to stoop to peer in, their view of diners' heads impeded by tiers of horizontal planes projecting from the inside of the windows. Those inside see elevated rows of legs and foreshortened bodies, just as if they were fish.