ABSTRACT
Barclays Bank Dominion Colonial and Overseas was one among many British corporations established during the Empire that employed cultural mechanisms – beyond the socio-cultural machinery constituted by the clearing house bank – in order to reconfigure its public visage for promoting its business in the commonwealth.1 Through architectural and publicity campaigns, Barclays DCO endeavoured to legitimate its claims both in Africa, the Caribbean and South America to ongoing regulatory authority and to participation in liberalizing British colonial policy. The partial appropriation of the Modern Movement design motif to erect a contemporary facade on its operations is exemplified by one page in the bank’s staff magazine. Under the caption “A Contrast in Style”, the page illustrates the Neoclassical Springs Branch in Transvaal as “The Traditional” and, below, the more functional Scottburgh Branch in Natal as “The Modern”.2 But the abstraction
of fluted Roman Doric columns at Springs into functionalist rectangular pillars at Scottburgh masks an increase in the bank’s commercial intervention in African development and its association with the increasingly volatile monetary infrastructures which would adversely affect postcolonial regimes across Africa. An additional dimension of the DCO operations in South Africa during the post-war decades is complicity with Afrikaner segregationist policy that was antipathetic to the socialist values espoused by most proponents of the Modern Movement, and even to the liberal pragmatism of the British Commonwealth.3
