BACKHOUSES Bank has stood sentry on Darlington’s High Row for exactly 150 years this month. It looks precisely how a bank should look – powerful, grand and dependable without being frivolous or wasteful. It looks like the sort of place in which you know you money will be as safe as houses.

More importantly, the bank is the centrepiece of the town’s most prestigious street, and coupled with the covered market complex over the road which was built at the same time by the same architect, it gives the town oomph. They were designed to make the statement that this was a town that had arrived, a town that meant business.

Work started on the bank in August 1864 when the market complex was nearing completion, and 20 months later on April 21, 1866 – 150 years ago this week – the Darlington & Stockton Times newspaper reported how the final touches were being put to the bank.

“Surely no one can look on the magnificent building, which now rears its head with such lofty grandeur, and feel disappointed,” said the paper. “As a specimen of the 13th Century Gothic style of architecture, it would be difficult to find its equal in the district.”

Admittedly, as 13th Century Gothic buildings do not abound in south Durham this is a small pool, but undoubtedly Backhouses Bank is one of Darlington’s most iconic buildings.

The story of the bank, though, goes back a further 100 years: in 1746, James Backhouse, a Quaker linen manufacturer from Yealand Redmayne, a village in north Lancashire just off the M6, married Jane Hedley, the sole heiress of a Darlington Quaker linen manufacturer. James, 25, moved over the Pennines to work with his father-in-law.

He found an agricultural market town that was small – there were 444 inhabited houses – but had a thriving linen and textile trade. He stayed.

A devout Quaker, James often travelled to London for his religious meetings. As he was going, his fellow Quakers asked him to take their money and deposit it in the London Quaker banks. To make sure everything was in order, he wrote receipts for all the money he was given.

Plus, as a linen manufacturer, he found himself at the centre of a chain of pieceworkers, each doing one process in transforming flax into cloth, and so as the product moved along the chain, he was advancing some people credit and collecting money from others.

By the late 1750s, almost by accident, he found that he was a banker.

He officially established his bank, with his eldest son Jonathan, in 1774. Their first office was in Northgate, near the old post office, until 1815 when a crisis of confidence hit Britain’s banks – similar to what we experienced in 2008 after the collapse of Northern Rock.

Backhouses survived partly due to the loyalty of their customers – when the bank was in danger, one of them, Thomas Ord of Archdeacon Newton, prevented a run on the bank by riding around all the influential farmers, persuading them to sign a petition protesting their confidence in the bank. He turned the petition into posters which he plastered all over town just before opening time on Monday morning.

They also survived due to Jonathan’s showmanship – if the bank was running short of gold, he would calmly put on his Quaker top hat and serenely walk out as if leaving for a prayer meeting. But once at Scotch Corner, he would speed away to London on his horse to get bullion and then ride home to replenish the vaults.

The only other bank in Darlington – Mowbray, Hollingsworth and Company, of Durham – were not so skilful, and collapsed, leaving their office in the centre of High Row vacant. Backhouses moved in.

It was from there that Jonathan arranged the finance for the Stockton and Darlington Railway, which opened in 1825, and which transformed Darlington from a market town into a centre of heavy industry.

By the 1860s, Darlington commanded such an empire of railways, collieries and ironworks, that there was a feeling among leading councillors that the architecture of the town should reflect its importance. They appointed Alfred Waterhouse, a young Quaker architect from Manchester, to build a landmark market complex, complete with town hall and iconic clocktower.

A fourth generation of Backhouses, Alfred, was now running the bank and he so liked the cut of Waterhouse’s gib that he asked him to create a country residence for him in Hurworth – now the Rockliffe Hall five star hotel – and to build him a bank worthy of the most important financial institution in County Durham. It was to be constructed on the site of Mowbray’s 17th Century offices, and while work was in progress, Backhouses’ homeless bankers temporarily occupied the new town hall.

Work was nearing completion in April 1866 when the D&S Times had a look round. It said: “Occupying a frontage of 70ft, and reaching about 69ft in height, it can claim an infinite superiority over any building in that part of the town which it adorns; whilst the carrying out of its details entitles it to be regarded as chaste, as well as bold and grand.”

Stone came from quarries at Dunhouse, near Staindrop, and Gatherley Moor, near Melsonby, with red polished granite columns, “judiciously dispersed” and topped with elaborately carved caps. “These support an arch exquisite in design, formed by immense clusters of mouldings, and giving force and character to the whole of the exterior,” said the D&S.

The reporter praised the design right up to the “handsome perforated parapet” at the top, and the “elaborately wrought iron castings” along the ridge of the roof.

Inside, he enthused over the “spacious and commodious” banking hall, with its elliptical arched roof, beautifully inlaid floor of black and white marble, and “its apparently interminable rows of French polished oak fittings and counterdesks (which) all bespeak unmistakeably of the imposing scale on which the bank has been designed”.

Upstairs was a luncheon room for the partners, entertaining rooms, bedrooms and kitchens, plus a very comfortable apartment for the manager and his family to live in. There was even a roof garden at the rear, which aerial photos suggest survives to this day – but is it still tended?

The very top attic rooms had yet to be fitted out when our reporter visited, but he said: “From the windows, an extensive view is obtained of the surrounding country, the verdant hills forming a refreshing background to the smoke and steam which pervades our largely-increasing town.”

And which helped make Mr Backhouse extremely rich.

The D&S Times report seems to have been as close as the bank came to an official opening ceremony.

For architect Waterhouse, the Darlington contracts for the Backhouses were a springboard to greater things. He became acclaimed as the greatest Gothic architect of the Victorian era, his career topped off by the Natural History Museum in South Kensington – the grand, multi-layered arched doorways of which have many similarities to the smaller, earlier version through which generations of Darlingtonians have walked for a century-and-a-half to do their banking.