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  • image Image 1 for SM (7) volume 75/2 (8) volume 60/6
  • image Image 2 for SM (7) volume 75/2 (8) volume 60/6
  • image Image 1 for SM (7) volume 75/2 (8) volume 60/6
  • image Image 2 for SM (7) volume 75/2 (8) volume 60/6

Reference number

SM (7) volume 75/2 (8) volume 60/6

Purpose

Design and record drawing for the Discount Office (2)

Aspect

7 Section looking west; (verso) section of the lantern 8 Interior perspective looking east

Scale

(7) bar scale

Inscribed

7 The Bank of England, Section of "Cheque Office" (now Post Bill 1833), and dimensions given 8 Design for the Discount Office, Bank of England

Hand

Soane office

Notes

This office was labelled as the Accountants Office in 1803 in a general plan of the Bank from 1803 (SM 9/2/16, drawing 103 in scheme 2:7) but it probably served as the Discount Office, as its design is very similar to preliminairy designs for the new Discount Office, made in 1805. The office is a square in plan, with an aisle on the east side that serves as a public area. The aisle has two Doric columns supporting a gallery above; in plan (see SM 9/3/4, drawing 4 in 2:2) the left-hand side door lets onto a spiral stair. The west side has a door to a small courtyard or lobby and another door to the adjacent office (see drawing 9). The room's light source is the large circular lantern supported on pendentives in the centre of the room. Drawing 7 shows the lantern with iron arch braces as in the Bank Stock Office, designed in 1792.

A narrow recess on a wedge-shaped plan is on the south side of the room, as a result of rooms joining at an irregular angle. The recess is shown on the left-hand side of the drawing, with a small door into a closet.

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).