currency brokers, 248 ship and insurance brokerages, and 1500 different merchants in the city, selling wares of every conceivable variety. At the centre of this nexus of private capital and commerce lay the Bank of England, which by the end of the century contained £20 million worth of gold reserves tied to the British Pound Sterling. It employed over 900 people and printed 15,000 new banknotes each day by 1896, doing some £2 million worth of business each day. The result of the shift to financial services in the city was that, even while its residential population was ebbing in favor of the suburbs (there was a net loss of 100,000 people between 1840 and 1900), it retained its traditional role as the center of English commerce. The working population swelled from some 200,000 in 1871 to 364,000 by 1911. Housing London's great expansion in the 19th century was driven by housing growth to accommodate the rapidly expanding population of the city. The growth of Transport in London in this period fueled the outward expansion of suburbs, as did a cultural impetus to escape the inner city, allowing the worlds of 'work' and 'life' to be separate. Suburbs varied enormously in character and in the relative wealth of their inhabitants, with some being for the very wealthy, and others being for the lower-middle classes. They frequently imitated the success of earlier periods of speculative housing development from the Georgian era, although the Victorian era saw a much wider array of suburban housing built in London. Terraced, semi-detached and detached housing all developed in a multitude of styles and typologies, with an almost endless variation in the layout of streets, gardens, homes, and decorative elements. Suburbs were aspirational for many, but also came to be lampooned and satirised in the press for the conservative and conventional tastes they represented (for example in Punch's Pooter). While the Georgian terrace has been described as "England's greatest contribution to the urban form", the increasing rigour with which Building Act regulations were applied after 1774 led to increasingly simple, standardised designs, which by the end of the 19th century were accommodating households at the lower-end of the socio-economic scale in some cases. Indeed, more grandly designed examples became less common by this period, as the very wealthy tended to prefer detached homes, and it was in this period in which terraces in particular became associated