Inscribed
Birmingham Branch // Mem. // The Iron Guard to back window of Library / refered (sic) to in Letters to Mr Soane of the 14th and 19th of May / 1829 is at the present time in two parts to open and is / fastened by bar connecting the rails in centre and locked / with a padlock - it is every morning opened by the Bank / Porter and fastened every night. This Guard was in the / first Instance fixed and fastened in wall and Mr Nicholls / on the 19th of May last informed me that some time ago / the Library Committee considered it a nuisance and gave him / to understand if it were not removed they would have it / removed themselves & in reply Mr Nicholls said if it were / removed a wall must be built before it for the security of / the Bank Premises he (Mr Nicholls) then learned there was / a clause in their lease to prevent any wall being built at / a specified distance he then made an agreement with the / Committee to make this Guard to open and that it should / be opened every morning and closed at night only; (verso): as above
Signed and dated
- 8th June 1829, signed Joseph Pepper
Medium and dimensions
Pen on laid secretary paper with three fold marks (320 x 203)
Hand
Joseph Pepper, clerk of works
Watermark
Britannia holding lance and olive branch with shield within crowned oval
Notes
The iron guard in question is shown on drawings 6, 7 and 9.
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
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