Alternative design for the Printing Office Court, 10 January 1804

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Bank of England
  - Bank of England, City of London for the Governor and Company of the Bank of England, 1788-1834 (1352)
    - 1799-1810 Expansions north-west and rebuilding of existing offices (487)
      - Second phase of the north-west extension: Printing Offices and offices south of the Waiting Room Court, 1803-1810 (21)

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Reference number

SM (4) 9/4/36

Purpose

Alternative design for the Printing Office Court, 10 January 1804

Aspect

4 Plan showing a circular office at the corner of Lothbury and Princes Street and semicircular-ended rectangular offices around a court

Scale

bar scale

Inscribed

The Bank, (Bailey) Sketch of a Design for offices at the North West angle, plan labelled (Soane): Court (four times), Accountants / Office, Vestibule, Loggia

Signed and dated

Jany 13^th 1804

Hand

Soane office and Soane

Notes

Drawing 4 is an alternative design for the north-west, with curving corners and a circular room fit within the irregular-shaped wing. Soane had designed the north-east corner (2:7) in a similar fashion, using a plan of semicircles and curving walls to reconcile the disjointed wings and awkward angles of the screen wall. Unlike the north-east wing, however, the north-west corner had the strictly utilitarian purpose of printing bank notes under secure, well-lit, and fireproof conditions; the picturesque qualities used for the private banking offices were not necessary. Soane consulted the Bank's chief printer, Garnet Terry, for the wing's design.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).