Scale
bar scale
Inscribed
The Bank of England, Elevation of the South Front, Elevation of the East Front, Elevation of the North Front, Threadneedle Street, Bartholomew Lane, Lothbury, Princes Street, (Soane) SW Corner, SE Corner, East front, North front, West front
Signed and dated
Hand
Soane office and Soane
Notes
In December 1814 Soane urged the Bank to rebuild its façades, citing the dilapidated state of the buildings and the thinness of the walls. He recommended rebuilding the entrance building and replacing the entablature and balustrade of the surrounding (Taylor) walls. Drawing 1 shows the proposed designs for the south and east fronts with Soane's inscriptions probably added as he was presenting the drawing to the Building Committee. The west elevation is not included, possibly having been trimmed from the sheet. Although the elevation is missing, however, a design for the rebuilding (or recladding) is shown in plan, as an extension of the existing Princes Street screen wall built in c. 1805, with a blind portico feature and a blind door that mirrors the existing features on the north end of the wall. The east elevation has a six-columned blind portico between two doorways (one blind) and two narrow projecting features. Drawing 12 shows this same design.
Level
Drawing
Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation
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).
