[18] Design for the diminished frontispiece on Lothbury Street

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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)
    - 1799-1810 Expansions north-west and rebuilding of existing offices (487)
      - Screen walls on Princes and Lothbury Streets, 1803-1807 (21)

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Reference number

SM 10/1/24

Purpose

[18] Design for the diminished frontispiece on Lothbury Street

Aspect

Elevation; ground floor plan; and attic plan

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

The Bank of England, Design for the Centre of the North Front

Signed and dated

1805

Hand

Soane office

Notes

Soane's ambitious frontispieces has been flattened and diminished, consisting of twin pilasters between antae raised on a socle and framing a semicircular niche and a caduceus relief panel. The caduceus, a staff entwined with two serpants, is carried by Mercury, protector of merchants.

This drawing shows the frontispiece with some of the alterations included in SM 10/1/25, such as a balustrade, caduceus and swag relief panels. However, there are still four pilasters, rather than two pilasters and two antae, and the niche contains an urn.

See SM 12/2/7 for a Royal Academy Lecture drawing for a variant design that includes an attic with a pedimented pedestal between panelled pilasters and fronted by urns on plinths.

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).