[8] Record drawing for the Discount Office

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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)
    - 1788-1793 Initial assessment of existing buildings and minor alterations (74)
      - Princes Street screen wall and offices, 1790-91 (9)

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Reference number

SM volume 60/6

Purpose

[8] Record drawing for the Discount Office

Aspect

Interior perspective looking east

Inscribed

Design for the Discount Office, Bank of England

Hand

Soane office

Notes

This drawing depicts what was labelled as the Accountants Office in a general plan of the Bank from 1803 (SM 9/2/16), but it probably served as the Discount Office, as its design is very similar to preliminairy designs for the new Discount Office, made in 1805.

It is a square in plan, with an aisle on the east side that serves as a public area. The aisle has two Doric columns supporting a gallery above; in plan (see SM 9/3/4), the left-hand side door lets onto a spiral stair. The west side has a door to a small courtyard or lobby and another door to the adjacent office (see SM 73/22). The room's light source is the large circular lantern supported on pendentives in the centre of the room. SM volume 75/2 shows the lantern with iron arch braces as in the Bank Stock Office, designed in 1792.

A narrow recess on a wedge-shaped plan is on the south side of the room, as a result of rooms joining at an irregular angle. The recess is shown on the left-hand side, with a small door into a closet.

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).