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  • image SM volume 73/16

Reference number

SM volume 73/16

Purpose

[26] Design for the basement of the Princes Street Vestibule and adjacent rooms

Aspect

Basement plan

Scale

bar scale

Signed and dated

  • datable to mid 1803

Hand

Soane office

Notes

This drawing shows the basement below the Princes Street entrance Vestibule.

The £5 note library was beneath the Accountants Office. It was for the storage of old banknotes. Though the banknotes were valueless, having been issued and paid into the Bank, they were stored in this secure library as evidence should a case of theft or forgery arise. Max Schlessinger's Saunterings in and about London, written in 1858, describes the author's visit to the Library in good detail (Max Schlesinger, Saunterings in and about London, 1853, pp. 224-226).

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).