[14] Record drawing of a design for the Printing Office Court

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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 2/2/4

Purpose

[14] Record drawing of a design for the Printing Office Court

Aspect

Plan of part of the Basement storey &c

Scale

bar scale

Inscribed

as above, The Bank of England, equal (twice)

Medium and dimensions

Pen & black ink, grey wash, pen & red ink, on laid paper (681 x 546)

Hand

Soane office

Notes

A design for the Printing Office Court was approved in January 1807. Another design was approved in October 1807. The multi-storey buildings surrounding the Printing Office Court were devoted to the process of printing bank notes, from the importing of paper to the drying of banknotes. The narrow offices on the west side of the court housed the thirty printing presses. Adjacent to the offices were the Engravers Rooms. On the opposite side of the Court stood clerical offices and storage.

The printing of bank notes had been contracted out to a London printer until 1791 when the process was moved onto the Bank's premises, setting up in an office over the Barracks (see Barracks and Bank Note Printing Office scheme). Despite working on site, the printer operated independently and under the only occassional supervision of a Bank clerk. The advent of 1 and 2 pound banknotes in 1797 greatly increased the printers' duties, from three employees in 1792 to twenty in 1800, and with eighteen presses in use (Mackenzie, p.40). The charcoal fumes heating the copper plates were causing illness within the confined rooms and the Bank's chief printer, Garnet Terry, repeatedly requested more space (Mackenzie, p.44). In March 1808 the new Printing Offices were finally finished. The handpresses had been replaced by machines, a faster and healthier alternative, and were housed in long rooms with windows on either side.

Literature

M. Acres, The Bank of England from within, 1931, pp. 322-345; A.D. Mackenzie, The Bank of England note: a history of its printing, 1953

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).