Anthony Reeve of Lassco Three Pigeons (or Arthur as the ATG prefers to call him) has sold the 17ft tall, four ton, entrance doors to the former Barclays Bank (dem. 1988) in Lombard Street, to be relocated as a feature set into the boundary of an amazing walled garden somewhere in England.
 
Barclays left their Lombard Street HQ and moved to Canary Wharf, removing the doors' substantial oak backing so that they no longer functioned as doors, and setting them high in an atrium in the replacement building, opposing each other, where the new owner no longer wanted them. The inevitable phone call took Mr. Reeve, ever-questing 1950s wheelerabilia, to the building site. He took one look at the ponderous problem and offered to buy the doors provided the contractors got them out of the atrium and on to Lassco's truck, which they did.
 
The doors were cast by the Morris Singer art bronze foundry, formerly in Frome and now Braintree, which in 2010 was bought by the artist with a business degree, Nasser Azam, and renamed Zahra Modern Art Foundries. Morris Singer cast many famous bronze commissions inlcuding two of the 1867 Edwin Landseer lions in Trafalgar Square, and Truth Overcoming Falsehood by Alfred Stevens in St Paul's Cathedral.
 
Although the doors were sold for a substantial sum, we are guessing that they did not outrank the currently most expensive Lassco entranceway inventory consisting of a pair of scagliola columns and pilasters with a ticket price of £90,000. This entranceway was believed to have been acquired by Lassco from a Regency house in Tonbridge twenty years ago, and sold to Pelham Galleries, whose stock includes another fabulous entranceway - the Chesterfield House (dem. 1937) railings, originally made for the Duke of Chandos country house, Canons in Middlesex (dem. 1747), probably by the French Huguenot craftsman Jean Montigny. Pelham Galleries decorated their stand at TEFAF Maastricht with the scagliola set, and left them on commission sale at Lassco Brunswick House between times.
 
"The set is exactly what you see in first rate country houses," said Adrian Amos of Lassco, "and, by the way, nothing at Lassco is expensive."