[2] General plan, showing drains and vaults in the Bank

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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)
      - Vaults beneath the Directors' offices and Pay Hall, 1805-1808, 1824 and 1830 (14)

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Reference number

SM 9/2/5

Purpose

[2] General plan, showing drains and vaults in the Bank

Aspect

General Plan shewing the principal Drains and Cesspools &c

Scale

bar scale

Inscribed

as above, The Bank of England

Signed and dated

(see Notes)

Hand

Soane office

Watermark

Joseph Ruse Tovil Mill Maidstone 1803

Notes

This drawing and SM 9/2/6 show the north-west extension as built at different dates. The date on SM 9/2/6 could be inaccurate, as it appears to have been added later. A General Plan of the vaults was ordered in November 1804, possibly resulting in the drawing. This drawing is from a later date, however, as it shows the vaults under the new Directors' offices (as in SM 9/4/43). The drawing also includes a corridor under the Pay Hall, as shown in SM 10/6/6.

In 1804/ early 1805 several vaults under the Directors' offices were secured or rebuilt for the 'large amount of Spanish Dollars expected' (Building Committee minutes, p.16). Two small cellars were arched over for even more space, and a corridor was built linking these new vaults to the Bullion Office.

The vaults beneath the Accountant's Office functioned as a library of old bank notes. The old notes had no value but were kept as potential evidence against forgeries (Slessinger, p.225).

Literature

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).