[17] Design for Perkins central heating in the Director's Offices, after 1830

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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)
      - Directors' parlours, 1805-1807 (20)

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Reference number

SM 2/3A/2

Purpose

[17] Design for Perkins central heating in the Director's Offices, after 1830

Aspect

Plan and elevation of the furnace room at the north-east corner of the Garden Court

Scale

bar scale

Inscribed

The Bank of England, Part of the / Court Room, The Garden, Furnace for hot water apparatus / for warming Court Room, Part of the Hall, Window of Hall

Signed and dated

after 1830 (see Notes)

Hand

Soane office

Notes

The Offices were heated by a single furnace at the north-east corner of the Garden Court.

Angier March Perkins was the son of Jacob Perkins, an American inventor who developed high pressure steam and, among other patents, he invented a central heating system. Jacob moved to London in 1819 to pursue his business of steel engraving (unsuccessfully marketing his secure banknote printing methods to the Bank of England). Angier, also an engineer, followed his family to London in 1821. After further developing his father's central heating system, he set up a business on Harpur Street in London in 1830. Angier achieved great commerical success with his high-pressure system, installing it in churches, houses and important institutions such as the Bank of England.

Perkins's high pressure water system was supplied in 1833, at a cost of £100, for use in the Court Room. The same apparatus was installed at 13 Lincolns Inn Fields in 1831, where it was still in use in the twentieth century (Bolton, p. 68).

Literature

A. Bolton, The Works of Sir John Soane, R.A., Architect, 1924, p.68
Baker Perkins Historical Society webpage

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).