[5] Contract drawing for the central portion of the western Bank building, August 1766

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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 (1356)
    - 1788-1793 Initial assessment of existing buildings and minor alterations (74)
      - Bank buildings by Sir Robert Taylor, 1766 and 1802 (10)

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Reference number

SM 1/3/5

Purpose

[5] Contract drawing for the central portion of the western Bank building, August 1766

Aspect

A Plan of the Chamber Story of the Building to be erected in Cornhill & Threadneedle Street

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

as above, referred to in the Articles between Mess^rsJames & Fordice for themselves & Robert Taylor on behalf of the Bank of England, Bed Chamber, Dressing Room, Closett, and dimensions given

Signed and dated

Rob^t Taylor, Alex Fordyce, W^mJames, Dated this 14^th Day of August 1766

Medium and dimensions

Pen and grey wash, within double ruled border, on laid paper (372 x 531)

Hand

Taylor office

Watermark

J Villedary

Notes

The building shown here is one of the four Bank Buildings. It occupied the north elevation of the triangular block, facing Threadneedle Street and the Bank of England (the building coloured in red on SM 1/3/7). As the drawing shows, the building is both a residence and a large office space on the ground floor. Two separate dwellings occupy the three floors above the offices and the two basement storeys. A separate part of the basement, consisting of two strong rooms, is apportioned to the offices and accessed by a separate staircase. Taylor has used top-lighting to light one of the enclosed offices on the ground floor.

Occupying the office space was a banking firm called Neale, James, Fordyce & Down, a firm closely associated with the European financial crisis of 1772-3. In June 1772 Alexander Fordyce fled the country and the firm stopped payments, precipitating a banking crisis throughout Scotland as well as in London and Amsterdam (Sutherland, pp.445-6).

Literature

L.S. Sutherland, Politics and Finance in the Eighteenth Century, 1984, pp. 445-6.

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).