An American president and Beatrix Potter were among just some of the customers of an historic Ambleside bank that is set to be converted.

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.

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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 Group Archives joined to tell the story – and the social history of the bank.

(Image: Barclays by courtesy of Martins Bank Archive) The galleries of staff contained on the Martins Bank website have proved very popular.

The staff database now contains career details of 25,000 members of staff with the information available to family tree researchers, friends and relatives.

One of the most intriguing images contained in the archive is that of a rarely seen Ambleside cheque that bears the crest of Messrs Wakefield Crewdson & Co.

This is how the bank’s cheques looked when President Wilson opened his account.

(Image: Barclays by courtesy of Martins Bank Archive .) The bank staff even had their own publication entitled 'Martin's Bank Magazine' which brought news of the changing times from 1946 to 1969.

A love of the Lake District can be deduced from its pages after a visit to Ambleside in 1952.

A quote from the edition reads: "There is a great temptation when writing about a visit to the Lake Dist­rict to indulge in descriptive passages, for each of us thinks that no other person can possibly have felt quite the same as we have done when faced with so much grandeur and beauty.

(Image: Barclays by courtesy of Martins Bank Archive .) "But the Lakes have been well publicised by our poets and writers and their beauties are well-known to many of our readers, so we must confine ourselves to the object of our visit —that of meeting some of our colleagues who represent the Bank in Westmorland.  

"For us a visit to Ambleside is like going home; we have had so many happy times there with our children and we have so many friends that to set foot in our Ambleside branch is just like returning home after a long absence."

Co-incidentally, the theme of the Martins Bank website this month is the Lake District.

To view more, visit www.martinsbank.co.uk.