The Griffin

History

Opened Built 1865-67 as a bank

Built

1865-67, for the Cumberland Union Banking Company

Architect

Daniel Birkett

Listed

Grade II, 13 November 1972, as the Midland Bank

The name

Midland Bank's griffin emblem, 1965-97

The Griffin never set out to be a pub. It was built as a bank, and it still looks like one. The initials C.U.B.C. are carved over the right-hand door, and the old bank lettering survives above the entrance.

The Cumberland Union Banking Company commissioned it in 1865, to a design by Daniel Birkett, an architect working out of Carlisle and Liverpool who also designed the 1874 extension to what is now the Turf Tavern on Newmarket Road. A bricklayers' strike held the job up and it didn't open until 1867. Three storeys of calciferous sandstone ashlar on a rusticated plinth, four bays to each face with an angled bay on the corner, a four-columned porch, and big round-headed windows on the ground floor where the banking hall was: the architecture of a business that wanted you to believe your money was safe with it.

It later became a Midland Bank, which is the name it's still listed under, Grade II since 13 November 1972. HSBC took full ownership of Midland in 1992 and dropped the Midland name in 1999, the branch closed, and the building found a second life pulling pints. The name looks like the bank's too. From 1965 until April 1997 Midland's emblem was a griffin, a stylised prancing one inside a ring of twenty-two gold coins standing for the banks it had swallowed, and it is hard not to read the pub's name as the beast staying on after the bank left.

The Old Bank on Fisher Street makes the pair: the Carlisle and Cumberland's bank of about 1837 against the Cumberland Union's of 1867, two different banks, two pubs.

Greene King own it now. A mezzanine went in during the conversion, with a balcony looking down on the entrance. Not everyone rates the result: one reviewer called the interior disappointingly anodyne, which is a fair criticism of most grand-bank-to-pub conversions. It is a big, busy pub sixty metres from the station, with screens on both floors and two pool tables.