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# Bank of England

**Contents:**

- [Founding (1694)](#founding-1694)
- [Threadneedle Street and the Old Lady](#threadneedle-street-and-the-old-lady)
- [Nationalisation and independence](#nationalisation-and-independence)
- [Banknotes](#banknotes)

The Bank of England is the central bank of the United Kingdom and one of the oldest in the world. It was chartered in 1694 to underwrite a war loan to the Crown, was nationalised in 1946, and was granted operational independence in 1997.

![The Bank of England headquarters at Threadneedle Street, London](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/7146388cc7058a7f.jpg)

*Photo: David Iliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bank_of_England_Building,_London,_UK_-_Diliff.jpg).*

## Founding (1694)

The Bank of England was founded by Act of Parliament on 27 July 1694 to lend William III's government £1,200,000 for the Nine Years' War against Louis XIV's France. The scheme was the work of a Scottish merchant in London, William Paterson, who proposed a joint-stock bank that would underwrite the loan in exchange for the right to issue banknotes against it. The Tonnage Act of 1694, drafted by Charles Montagu, gave the proposal statutory form.

The whole £1,200,000 was subscribed in twelve days. William III and Mary II were among the original subscribers, each pledging £10,000.

## Threadneedle Street and the Old Lady

For its first forty years the Bank operated from rented halls in the City of London: Mercers' Hall on Cheapside until the end of 1694, then Grocers' Hall. It moved into its own building on Threadneedle Street in 1734.

The nickname *the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street* came from a 1797 satirical print by James Gillray, *Political-Ravishment, or the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street in Danger!*, in which Prime Minister William Pitt is shown seducing the Bank, personified as an elderly woman in a dress of one-pound notes, in order to reach the gold coins in her pocket. Pitt had recently suspended the convertibility of Bank of England notes into gold under the Bank Restriction Act, prompted by fears of a French invasion. The playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan had made the same joke in the House of Commons two months earlier, but it was the printed image that fixed the name.

## Nationalisation and independence

The Bank Charter Act of 1844 gave the Bank a near-monopoly on note issue in England and Wales, leaving the Scottish and Northern Irish commercial banks more limited rights against gold reserves. Clement Attlee's Labour government nationalised the Bank in 1946. In 1997, under Gordon Brown as Chancellor, it was granted operational independence in setting interest rates through a new Monetary Policy Committee.

Andrew Bailey, formerly chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority, has been Governor since 16 March 2020, a few days before the United Kingdom's first COVID-19 lockdown.

## Banknotes

The Bank issues [pound sterling](page:4175) banknotes featuring the reigning monarch on the obverse and a notable British figure on the reverse, a convention introduced in 1970. Before that, the reverse showed allegorical figures of Britannia.

The current polymer Series G features Winston Churchill on the £5, Jane Austen on the £10, J.M.W. Turner on the £20 and Alan Turing on the £50. The Charles III obverse, on the same designs, was added in June 2024.