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Purpose

Barracks, 1805-1807 (19)

Signed and dated

  • Main Year: 0

Notes

The Barracks were relocated to the new north-west wing in 1805. In 1803 the Military Comittee recommended this move, but maintained that a strong door be erected between the Barracks and the rest of the Bank. The Barracks housed the nightly Bank Guard, a troop of thirty soldiers of the King's Guard who marched to the Bank each night to carry out their service. It's new location was on the north side of the Printing Office Court, occupying the lower floors and facing the Soldier's Court on its north side. The exterior of the Barracks building communicates its purpose, with heavy rusticated columns, spears and piles of cannon-balls. A simple Doric order marks the entrance. The building commitee approved Soane's design in May 1805. The windows were installed in late summer 1806 (SMA Bank accounts).

Literature: M. Acres, The Bank of England from Within, 1931, pp. 387-389.

Madeleine Helmer, 2011

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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.

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Contents of Barracks, 1805-1807 (19)