[5] Preliminary design for re-arranging the Court and Committee Rooms, December 1804

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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)
      - Second phase of the north-west extension: Printing Offices and offices south of the Waiting Room Court, 1803-1810 (21)

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Reference number

SM 9/4/39

Purpose

[5] Preliminary design for re-arranging the Court and Committee Rooms, December 1804

Aspect

Rough plan showing an outline of the existing buildings in pencil, overlaid with a preliminary design for the proposed offices

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

(Soane) Do not hang any / of the doors / in the new Great Off[ice] / Staircase Qy, Qy office now / over Bullion office / Qy Bank note office / & the Room over / it, plan labelled (Soane, some in pencil): Clerk of Co[mmitee] / Wait, Wait[ing room], Gov[ernor's Room], Dep[uty] / Governors / room, Parl[or] / door [keeper], Coffee / Room, Court Room, Lobby, Secret[ary], Cashiers / office, M^rNew[land], M^rNew, Wait[ing Room] (three times), Court, Commitee / in / Wa[iting], Disc[ount] Office, Clearer, Divid[end], Qy Inspectors, Qy Income Office, (Bailey) Lothbury

Signed and dated

The Bank of England / Dec^r311804

Hand

Soane

Notes

This drawing and SM 9/4/33 show a design for re-arranging the offices in the new extension and the south-west wing. The drawings show the first phase of the north-west extension as built but with the rooms allocated to different uses. Robert Taylor's Court and Committee Rooms (1780-88) are shown as offices for higher bank notes, and the Accountant's Office (known later as the £5 Note Office) is converted to a Committee Room. The existing directors' offices and waiting rooms are rebuilt to form one long corridor extending west from the Bullion Court. The re-arrangement of the Bank as shown moves the directors' offices (which includes the Governor's Room, the Deputy Governor's Room, the Court and Committee Rooms and the waiting rooms) to the more secluded north-west wing while gathering the more public clerks' offices (including the Drawing Office, the Discount Office, the Chancery Office and the bank note offices) closer to the Bank's main entrance.

In mid-March 1805 the Building Committee approved Soane's plan for relocating the Court Room and directors' offices, as shown in SM 9/2/11 and SM 9/2/14, but two weeks later they requested an alternative plan. In April, five more directors were added to the Committee to assist in considerations for the ambitious new proposal, and on 9 April 1805 the Committee came to a resolution. They agreed to alter the existing directors' offices while preserving the Court and Committee Rooms. The building works were carried out from 1807 to 1808 (see the Directors’ parlours scheme).

Literature

D. Abramson, Building the Bank of England, 2005, p.162

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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).