The Lake District National Park Authority has approved plans from Casterton Leisure Ltd to transform the former Barclays Bank at Skylark House into a café. The Barclays Bank on Market Place closed in 2014 after a 60 per cent decline in customer visits. READ MORE: Town council pays tribute to iconic cinema set to close READ MORE: Survivor meets mountain rescuers 40 years on READ MORE: Last RAF member who flew Windermere Children dies The three-storey building dates all the way back to the Victorian era.
Opened in 1871, it is one of the oldest of Martins Bank Lake District Branches and comes from the amalgamation in 1893 of Messrs Wakefield Crewdson’s Kendal Bank and the Bank of Liverpool. In 1906, none other than American President Woodrow Wilson opened an account there during a stay in the Lake District. (Image: Barclays by courtesy of Martins Bank Archive) From 1928, the Bank had become Martins Bank, and the floors above the Ambleside branch were later used as a rest house, ran by house warden Mrs M E McIntire for staff from all over the country to forget the horrors of war.
Manager Mr E B Totty took part in a programme about young canoeists on the BBC Light Programme in 1952 and by the 1960s, there were more than fifty branches of the bank in the Lake District. Jonathan Snowden created the Martins Bank Archive in 1988 when he worked in the Head Office of Martins in Liverpool. The collection has grown to more than 3,000 items, and since going online in 2009, Barclays Gro.