Historic Thatched Bank in Cambridgeshire Listed
The former Lloyds Bank on Main Street, Littleport, Cambridgeshire, has been listed at Grade II by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on the advice of Historic England.
The 1931 building is an extremely rare example of a purpose-built commercial bank built in the vernacular style with a thatched roof.
The building was designed to provide a banking hall and bank manager’s office with private living accommodation for the bank manager and his family. The living accommodation included a dining room, pantry, kitchen and coal store at ground floor level with 5 bedrooms, a drawing room and bathroom on the first floor.
A celebration of local craftmanship
Designed by architects Henry Munro Cautley and Leslie Barefoot for Lloyds Bank, the building combines practical banking facilities with vernacular East Anglian character. The reed-thatched roof, decorative pargetting featuring the black horse of Lloyds Bank and grapevines, and ornate carved doorways, demonstrate exceptional traditional craftsmanship.
Cautley, and later Cautley and Barefoot, designed a number of bank buildings for Lloyds Bank, including those at Gentleman’s Walk, Norwich (1924), St Ives (1924-1925), Wisbech (1926-1928), and Tuesday Market Place, King’s Lynn (1928), each listed at Grade II, all in a Beaux Arts style (a grand, opulent, and highly decorative architectural movement from late 19th and early 20th-century Paris), with round-arched windows. Elsewhere in Cambridgeshire, Cautley and Barefoot also designed the Ely branch in 1924 and extended the Cambridge branch in 1935, originally built in 1891 to designs by A and P Waterhouse (listed at Grade II*).
Recognising community heritage
The former Lloyds Bank building contributes to the historic character of Main Street alongside Adams Heritage Centre, which was also recently listed at Grade II.
The former bank was adapted for use as offices in the early 21st century and the living accommodation was converted to residential flats in 2016.
This distinctive, and rare, thatched commercial building is an important part of Littleport’s character, and our national story. It is something for locals to be proud of and we’d love to hear people’s memories of the bank through our Missing Pieces Project on our website.
Also of interest
