Londoners had never seen anything quite like it. After extensive reconstruction during the late 1790s (Makepeace 2010: 17), East India House, located on the south side of Leadenhall Street, a principal thoroughfare in the City of London, reopened in April 1800. Designed in the Hellenic Ionic style, the headquarters of the East India Company was approximately 200 feet long and 60 feet high. It consisted of two austere wings offset by a balustrade and a hexastyle entrance portico crowned by a pediment. On a pedestal above the apex of the pediment was Britannia, spear in hand, riding a lion. Flanking Britannia on pedestals on either side of the pediment were the figures of Europe and Asia, riding a horse and a camel respectively. Many considered the building ‘the most faultless structure of the kind in London’, as one admirer described it (J. Anderson 1835: 340), and numbered it ‘among the most magnificent [public structures] in the city’ (Lewis 1831: 131). Its effect on passers-by was arresting (Figure 1.1).

The East India Company, tracing its roots to a private maritime trading organisation formed by royal charter at the beginning of the seventeenth century and a subsequent merger between rival merchants, had operated from this site since 1648, the year it became a permanent joint-stock organisation. Its previous two headquarters on the site were impressive. But this headquarters was distinguished by the tympanum of the pediment, which towered over the principal entrance: unlike the tympana of similarly stylised buildings, it was not plain. Contemporary commentators could cite no other example in the United Kingdom of a tympanum enriched by sculpture. (Until the construction on Pall Mall in the late 1820s of the Greek Revivalist Athenaeum clubhouse, the focus of Chapter 2, the expensive technique of adding a bas-relief frieze to a building's exterior would not be tried again in London.) The frieze, designed by the noted sculptor John Bacon the Elder, proclaimed British magnanimity and benevolence. It depicted King George III, dressed in Roman armour, safeguarding commerce in the East with figures representing Order, Wisdom, Religion and Justice by his side. The figure of the king suggested a defensive rather than a militarily aggressive posture. He held a downturned, possibly unsheathed sword in one hand.