Design for iron safes in the Specie Vault, September 1806

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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)
      - Vaults beneath the Directors' offices and Pay Hall, 1805-1808, 1824 and 1830 (14)

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Reference number

SM (6) 10/6/9

Purpose

Design for iron safes in the Specie Vault, September 1806

Aspect

6 Plan; and plan of iron safe

Scale

bar scale

Inscribed

The Bank of England, Plan of the Basement Story under the Court & Committee Rooms, (pencil) Iron Safe, calculations and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

September 1806 (see Notes)

Hand

Soane office

Notes

The drawing shows the Specie Vaults, located under the Court and Committee Rooms. On 6 September 1806, the Building Committee ordered 22 'iron closets' for the 'Specie vault', to accompany the 2 existing iron closets. The 24 safes are shown in drawing 6, corresponding with the above Building Committee note and thereby confirming the drawing's date and room's purpose. 'Specie' means coin, as in minted pieces of metal (OED), distinguishing the vault's contents as opposed to the other vaults that contained, for example, Bullion, Spanish Dollars, Bank notes and Deposits.

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.

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