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

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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)
      - First phase of north-west extension: Waiting Room Court, Accountants Office and Doric Vestibule, 1801-1804 (111)

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Reference number

SM 10/6/4

Purpose

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

Aspect

Basement floor plan

Scale

bar scale

Inscribed

The Bank of England, Centre of £5 Note Library, 13 by 13, Plan of part of the Basement Story and dimensions given

Signed and dated

datable to 1827 or after (watermark)

Hand

Soane office

Watermark

Smith & Allnutt 1827

Notes

This drawing shows the basement below the Princes Street entrance Vestibule. The watermark indicates that it was made after 1827. The drawing could have been executed when Soane was seeking storage vaults beneath the Bank, a common occurrence during his surveyorship. The drawing shows partitions in the vaults, perhaps indicating storage vaults.

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).