[20] Presentation drawing of the Discount Office with barrel vaulted end bays

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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)
      - Discount Office and Long Passage, 1805-1806 (31)

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Reference number

SM volume 75/14

Purpose

[20] Presentation drawing of the Discount Office with barrel vaulted end bays

Aspect

Ground floor plan with a reflected ceiling plan

Scale

bar scale

Inscribed

(capitals) The / Bank / of / England, The plan / of / the new Discount Office, and dimensions given

Hand

Soane office

Notes

The north and south arms of the room are barrel-vaulted. Coffered semicircular arches separate the arms from the central area. The ceiling of the central bay is panelled with an ornamented domical recess in the centre. To the east and west are segmental arches decorated with a Greek key motif; these arches lead into an aisle (to the east) and a recess (to the west), as in early designs for the office. As in all previous designs, the office appears to be symmetrical on a north-south axis, with blind arches flanking the west recess so that it appears to have the same dimensions as the aisle opposite.

The sections show a frieze with a floral wave scroll decorating the impost of the barrel vaults. Within the barrel vaults are semicircular arches leading to the west aisle (blind on the east side). In a reduced style, the arches are set within shallow arched recesses.

The interior of the Discount Office was approved in February 1806. At this time the Building Committee also agreed that an Inspector's Office should be built over the Discount Office. The Inspector's Office had originally been located in an office to the north-west of the Accountant's Office, built in 1804. The position of Inspector at the Bank was created to combat the increasing number of forgeries, especially of the highly circulated lower denomination bank notes. Several clerks were employed to trace forgers and procure their arrest. In his history of the Bank, Marston Acres recounts some of their duties. In recognition of the occupation's many dangers, the clerks were paid 1s. 9d. an hour for extra attendance and they sometimes earned a reward for notorious criminals. Thomas Glover and Thomas Bliss were the first men employed as investigators (Acres).

Literature

M. Acres, The Bank of England from within, 1931, pp. 322-335

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).