Designs for the Cashier's Office, showing interior ornament, one dated 29 May 1805 (2)

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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)
    - 1791-1801 Rebuilding of offices in the east wing and north-east extension (430)
      - Chief Cashier's Office, 1799-1802 (6)

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Reference number

SM (5) volume 75/35 (6) 91/2/4a

Purpose

Designs for the Cashier's Office, showing interior ornament, one dated 29 May 1805 (2)

Aspect

5 Section looking east showing coffered pendentive dome with ribbed soffits and an apsidal west end ornamented with coffering and containing two doors, each set within a blind semicircular arch 6 Two transverse sections with one section looking west

Scale

(5-6) bar scale (sheet trimmed)

Inscribed

5 Design for the end of the Cashiers Office, The Bank of England and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

(6) Lincolns Inn Fields May 29^th 1805

Hand

Soane office

Notes

The Cashier's Office in plan was rectangular with a semicircular end. Upon observing the Bank of England firsthand, authors Yerbury and Steele found the Chashier's Office to be of special interest: 'The internal wall surface was panelled in wood: the panels flush with style and rail and so carefully put together that, with a covering of paint, the joints were invisible except in a strong light. It is said that the object of this wooden skin was to make the office - a large room 47 by 29 feet- warmer for the clerks'. Photographs taken of the Bank before its demolition (1925) show that the ceilings, though remarkable, did not contain as much decoration as shown in drawings 4 and 5. The apsidal ceiling was only decorated with two simple panels and the pendentive dome was ornamented with umbrella-like ribs and an incised Greek key pattern similar to the Rotunda.

The west end of the Cashier's Office was reconstructed as a part of the Long Passage in 1805.

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).