[2] Record drawing of the Rotunda and Four Per Cent Office

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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)
    - 1791-1801 Rebuilding of offices in the east wing and north-east extension (431)
      - Four Per Cent Office, 1793-97 (11)

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Reference number

SM volume 74/75

Purpose

[2] Record drawing of the Rotunda and Four Per Cent Office

Aspect

Section from the west showing the Rotunda and the Four Per Cent Office without interior ornament

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

(Bailey) Section through the Consols Dividend Office and the Rotunda, looking East

Hand

Soane office

Notes

The Four Per Cent Office (later the Consols Dividend Office) was located to the north of the Rotunda, on axis with Threadneedle Street. This drawing, SM volume 74/99 and SM volume 74/106 show the relationship between these two halls in section. In SM volume 74/106, one of Robert Taylor's two remaining transfer halls is included in the section.

The Four Per Cent Office was built basically from the same plan as the Bank Stock Office. In elevation, however, the Four Per Cent Office was different: the large arches around the main hall were semicircular while the long arms contained segmental arches, essentially an inverse of the Bank Stock Office. Doric columns supported the lantern roof rather than the iron ties of the Stock Office lantern. The decoration was also different, with ribbed pendentives and a Greek key motif incised in the pilasters. The latter ornamentation resembled the decoration of the Rotunda, designed and built simultaneously to the Four Per Cent Office.

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).