[25] Site record drawing of the south-east corner, showing parts of the wall already built, 16 October 1823

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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)
    - 1817-1833 Rebuilding of offices in the south-east and the façade, temporary office spaces and presentation drawings (221)
      - East, south and west façades, 1823-1828 (54)

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Reference number

SM volume 71/16

Purpose

[25] Site record drawing of the south-east corner, showing parts of the wall already built, 16 October 1823

Aspect

View

Inscribed

Bank of England, South East Angle

Signed and dated

16/10/23 and 16 Oct 1823

Hand

Soane office

Notes

The squared corners of Robert Taylor's screen wall were rounded-off as part of the street front building works. In this drawing and SM volume 60/39, the wall at the south east corner has been stripped of its facing, with the semicircular niches and the stone masonry exposed. A square rainwater pipe is visible at the corner of the brickwork. One of the recently-built transfer offices is also shown.

The drawing shows the ground level of the east and south fronts already complete; even lamp-posts are included on the east front.

Soane first introduced rounded corners when he built the Lothbury Street screen wall in 1797. The corners provided a picturesque appearance and they also facilitated the easier movement of traffic. Daniel Abramson (op.cit) points out that Soane credited his inspiration to John Gwynn's 1766 plan for London.

Literature

D. Abramson, Building the Bank of England: money, architecture, society 1694-1942, 2005, p.126

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).