Career
Born at Hutton Hang near Richmond, North Yorkshire. After spending two years at sea, Banks began as a day labourer in 1789. He worked under the engineer John Rennie the Elder on the Lancaster Canal and Ulverston Canal and rose to the chief control in his partnership Jolliffe & Banks, contractors for public works.
Banks and Jolliffe were responsible for building bridges, dockyards, lighthouses and prisons.
Among his undertakings were Staines bridge, the naval works at Sheerness dockyard, and the new channels for the rivers Ouse, Nene, and Witham in Norfolk and Lincolnshire. They were the builders of the Waterloo, Southwark, and London bridges.
He owed his fortune principally to these contracts, which he took under the superintendence of the Rennies. Banks lived in Adelphi Terrace, Westminster.
He also owned rural estates centred on Oxney Court, Dover and Sheppey Court, Kent.
In June 1822 Banks was knighted for building the Waterloo and Southwark bridges. The story that whilst working as a day labourer upon the early 19th century Merstham tram-road, he had been struck with the beauty of the neighbouring small village of Chipstead, choosing to be buried there for that reason its quiet churchyard, is a myth as suggested by oral tradition and in Lewis Topographical Dictionary as he chose it as the Jolliffe family were patrons of that church, in-law relations and his business associates.
