Preliminary designs for existing offices and the new extension, and showing proposed rearrangement of the offices as in drawings 5 and 6

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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 (7) 9/2/11

Purpose

Preliminary designs for existing offices and the new extension, and showing proposed rearrangement of the offices as in drawings 5 and 6

Aspect

7 General plan

Scale

bar scale

Inscribed

(feint pencil) Vestibule, Committee, Parlor, Court, Court Room / 40'0 by 60'0, Dep. / Acc[ountant], One & Two / Pound / Notes / 20:0 by 38:0, One & Two Pound Notes / 55'0 by -- -- (illegible), Court, Cash Book / Office / 18 books, Chancery / Office / 16'0 by 17'0 / 5 clerks, Drawing / Office / 18:0 by 36:0 / Acct^s Dep^r/ 17 Clerks, G. Cash / Books / 16:0 by 24:0, 30:0 by 24:0, 5 £ Notes & Upwards M^rBentley / 30:0 by 60:0, Storekeeper, Acct^sDisct / 3 Clerks Griffen / 18:0 by 10:0, Discount Office / 24'0" by 40'0", Committee / in / Waiting / 39 by 21, Waiting Room / or / Committee / 15:0, Waiting Room / 12:0 (three times), Lobby, Court Room / 40'0 by 60'0, Committee of Treas[ury] / Governors Room, Waiting / Room (twice), Deputy Governors / Room / 24 by (?)18, Officers / Room, Officer / Bed / Room, Officers / --- (illegible), Arcade, Court, Passage, Guard Room, Court, Court, Waiting / Room (twice), ---er / of / Co-- (Committee?), Parlour / Doorkeeper, Waiting Room, Court, Coffee Room, Cashiers Office, Secretary, M^r Newlands / Room, Income & / Land Tax, Bullion Court, (Soane, pen) Of Barracks / Plan referred to / May 2^nd 1805, Stor:[age] Clos:[et], arcade, (Bailey) The Bank of England, as designed about the year 1802

Hand

Soane and Soane office

Watermark

1803

Notes

Drawing 7 is a general plan of the Bank that shows Soane's proposed alterations to the directors' parlours, the Discount Office, and the addition to the north-west. Pencil inscriptions on plan suggest rearranging the rooms as in drawings 5 and 6; that is, using the newly built Accountants Office as the Court Room and, in turn, using the Court and Committee Rooms (built by Rober Taylor) as a £5 Notes Office. Thus the more private directors' parlours would be relocated to the north-west, away from the front entrance, and the banking offices would move towards the front. This relocation of offices was practical but the Bank's directors resisted such a drastic change. Soane's proposal would have also given more stature to his new wing, situating the directors within Soane's architecture and relegating Taylor's south-west wing to clerks' offices.

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).