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Final Examination Area, 1957, by Feliks Topolski, Bank of England Museum, London
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Jennifer Adam

“This sketch by Feliks Topolski shows women checking freshly printed banknotes for errors and smudges. It is the final part of a process that occupied the purpose-built, 240m-long production hall at the Bank of England’s facility at Debden in Essex.

It is fair to say an image showing lots of women at work for the bank is a rare item in our collections, which tend to be full of pictures of male clerks and officials. But the opening of Debden in 1956 brought about huge changes in the way the bank operated.

The previous printing works had been based in a cramped building in Old Street in east London. But as the mechanics of making money changed, it wasn’t big enough to house new production techniques, so another base was sought. Debden was picked as it was accessible on the London Underground’s extended Central line and there was a pool of people looking for work, as the Debden estate was the new home of many East Enders displaced by war.

The drawing captures the improved working conditions. You can see huge arches made from reinforced concrete, which enabled the architects to create open spaces with no pillars. Between the arches are windows that bathed the hall in light, while parquet flooring reduced the noise.

The bank has a tradition of commissioning artwork to mark important moments and it asked Topolski to capture the spirit of the new works. The artist had, in fact, worked with the bank in 1941, when he drew a scene outside its Threadneedle Street headquarters after the road had been blown up by a bomb. The picture was withdrawn from view, as the information ministry considered it far too sensitive.

Sixteen years later, Topolski – perhaps best known as a portrait painter and the provider of cartoons for the Face to Face BBC television series of interviews – was invited to Debden to sketch the production line.

I like this image because, while the people in the background are in an impressionistic style, the woman at the front is a study of concentration. Her sitting position shows the intensity of the task she is performing; there is a sense of her attention to detail and being present in her work.

It certainly was high-speed labour, as these women would have been checking up to 15,000 banknotes in a shift.”

Interview by John Holt. Feliks Topolski: Drawing Debden is at the Bank of England Museum, London, until summer 2019

Jennifer Adam is the curator of the Bank of England Museum, London

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