Golden era of neo-Gothic

With mosaics on the floor and on the ceiling separated by tall, painted iron columns that support a series of flying arches with rich ribbing tracery; with gilding and wall stencilling, wondrous woodwork and churchy windows, the chamber has so much period wow, it could be seen as being riotously over the top.

But according to almost every architect and critic who has judged the space since it was completed in 1887, it is the Australian masterpiece of neo-Gothic architecture.

Even Robin Boyd, who normally condemned fatuous “featurism” in any building, was an ardent admirer of the chamber’s “gross extravagance of ornament”.

Boyd said the bank’s architect, William Wardell had achieved a masterpiece that was “a most distinguished building … light, brilliant, open and coherent”.

It cost twice as much as it should have. Yet when it was conceived to become the headquarters of the English, Scottish & Australian Bank by the firm’s general manager, Sir George Verdon, Melbourne was awash with the money that had percolated through the system since the gold rush and was at the height of the spending spree that was the land boom.

All that money flushed through the banks and by the 1880s, there were at least 20 banks in the near vicinity of Collins Street, all able to plough preposterous profits into buildings that visually suggested some connection with the ages of romance and chivalry.

The Gothic architecture revival had been stimulated by the rebuilding of London’s Houses of Parliament in 1834. For the next 100 years, even in the antipodes, the style reigned and there was no more prolific local practitioner than Wardell, who designed many of Melbourne’s landmark churches, including one of the world’s largest neo-Gothic ones, St Patrick’s Cathedral on Eastern Hill.

That 19th-century banks and offices adopted the features of mediaeval churches was seen as no contradiction in an era when virtue and power had shifted to secular wealth.

And so, along the lower part of Collins Street, which rapidly became Australia’s pre-eminent financial centre, a host of flamboyantly neo-Gothic buildings, including the Rialto and Olderfleet sites, manifested.

Right next door to the ES&A bank in Queen Street, another Gothic revivalist architect, William Pitt, took the commission for the Melbourne Safe Deposit Building, a seven-storey 1890s extravaganza that mimicked Venetian Gothic modelling.

On the other side of the neo-Gothic bank in Collins Street, Pitt also realised a variation on Venetian Gothic in the Old Stock Exchange building, which has at its core an amazing white-limestone space that is still known as “the Cathedral Room”.

Taken as a set, these buildings constitute an exemplary trio of Gothic Revival buildings that one commentator has labelled “the cathedrals of mammon”.

The ES&A Bank, now part of ANZ’s headquarters, is at 388 Collins Street.