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Lothbury and Bartholomew Lane screen walls, 1794-1797 (66)
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Lothbury and Bartholomew Lane screen walls, 1794-1797 (66)
Signed and dated
- Main Year: 0
Notes
After purchasing the Haines estate and surrounding properties to the north-east, Soane built a screen wall around the vacant site. He presented a design to the Building Committee in October 1794, for which he was given approval. Soane continued to refine the design until mid-1796. A house at the corner of Bartholomew Lane and Lothbury was not acquired until July 1796, and building works probably did not begin until after that date. Extending around Princes Street, Lothbury Street and Bartholomew Lane, the screen wall was completed by mid-1797. The new wall joined with Rober Taylor's screen wall on Bartholomew Lane. Taylor's back entrance gate on Bartholomew Lane was removed in September 1797.
The screen wall was a wrapping enclosure, appearing thin and simple while at the same time evoking its role as a fortification. A rampart walk ran behind the parapet at the top of the wall, with a door from the Porter's Lodge at the Lothbury gate. . The rusticated screen wall was raised on an eight foot high socle. The curving corners were both modelled on the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, displaying the temple's ornamentation and columniation. A bucranium and festoon frieze was omitted in the final design. Vitruvian windows were built on the existing wall when it was extended in 1805-1807.
Literature: W. Marston Acres, The Bank of England from within, Oxford, 1931, p.395; D. Abramson, Money's architecture: the building of the Bank of England, 1731-1833, Doctoral thesis for the Department of Fine Arts, Harvard University, 1993, p.354-355.
Madeleine Helmer, 2010
The screen wall was a wrapping enclosure, appearing thin and simple while at the same time evoking its role as a fortification. A rampart walk ran behind the parapet at the top of the wall, with a door from the Porter's Lodge at the Lothbury gate. . The rusticated screen wall was raised on an eight foot high socle. The curving corners were both modelled on the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, displaying the temple's ornamentation and columniation. A bucranium and festoon frieze was omitted in the final design. Vitruvian windows were built on the existing wall when it was extended in 1805-1807.
Literature: W. Marston Acres, The Bank of England from within, Oxford, 1931, p.395; D. Abramson, Money's architecture: the building of the Bank of England, 1731-1833, Doctoral thesis for the Department of Fine Arts, Harvard University, 1993, p.354-355.
Madeleine Helmer, 2010
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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).
Contents of Lothbury and Bartholomew Lane screen walls, 1794-1797 (66)
- Early designs for a wall on Lothbury Street, one dated 1794 (2)
- Working drawing for the corner of Lothbury Street and Bartholomew Lane, 23 October 1795
- Presentation drawings showing variant designs for a rusticated wall with figurative statues over the gateway, one dated 29 October 1795 (2)
- Preliminary design for the entrance
- Record drawings showing variant designs of a rusticated wall with figurative statues over the gateway, 30 October 1795 (2)
- Record drawings showing variant designs for a rusticated wall with figurative statues over the gateway, January 1796 (3)
- Variant designs for attic above the gateway, in Soane's hand, January and February 1796 (7)
- Working drawing and record drawing of the wall on Lothbury Street, 1796 (2)
- Designs for rampart walk over the gatehouse, February and May 1796 (8)
- Design for the Lothbury wall, February 1796
- Preliminary designs for acroteria, by George Dance, February 1796 (3)
- Working drawing for the attic, 8 February 1796
- Working drawings for masonry, one dated 31 March 1796 (2)
- Working drawings for the gate, July and August 1796 (3)
- Alternative designs for the attic of the corner, July 1796 (4)
- Presentation drawings for removal of the gateway on Bartholomew Street, one dated 15 September 1796 (2)
- Record drawings of alternative designs for the gatehouse attic (2)
- Record drawings of designs for the attic (2)
- Alternative designs for attic above the gateway, one dated May 1797 (2)
- Working drawings for the screen wall, one dated 3 May 1797 (2)
- Design and working drawing for a street lamp and the door on Lothbury Street, February 1797 (2)
- Unidentified working drawing for screen wall either on Bartholomew Lane or Lothbury Street, copied 8 July 1798
- Design for altering the steps and footway for the incline on Bartholomew Lane, April 1799
- Record drawings of the Lothbury wall (3)
- Presentation drawing of the screen wall on Lothbury Street, 10 October 1797
- Framed drawing of the entrance from Lothbury Street, 1804
- Record drawing of the wall from Lothbury Street
- Record drawings showing the screen wall with blind windows (2)
- Design for a screen wall with blind windows, 30 June 1803
- Record drawing of a design for the screen wall with niches and figurative statues