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The evolution of Soane’s Bank Stock Office at the Bank of England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

John Summerson
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Extract

In the Bank Stock Office at the Bank of England, built in 1792, Soane created an interior of a kind previously unknown in England and not found elsewhere except in a type of Byzantine church with which few English architects were familiar and which none would have regarded as an acceptable model for imitation. The building, demolished about 1925, may be described as follows (Pis ia, 2b and 9b): It was cruciform, consisting of a square central area or ‘crossing’, extending from which were two deep arms (north and south) and two shallow arms (east and west).

Type
Section 2: London
Information
Architectural History , Volume 27: Design and Practice in British Architecture , 1984 , pp. 135 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1984

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References

Notes

1 Steel, H. R. and Yerbury, F. R. The Old Bank of England, London (1930)Google Scholar, pls lxiii, lxiv andlxvi (photographs) and folding plate (measured drawing of longitudinal sections). Sets of Yerbury’s photographs are in the Soane Museum and the National Monuments Record.

2 Records by Soane of Taylor’s halls, showing the mode of construction, are in SM, Drawer 1, Set 2, Nos 11,12 and 13. The vertical timbers supporting the roof appear to have been fixed in iron ‘shoes’ with a vertical member transferring the weight to the column below. The specimen in the Museum (Inventory M2 and M3) consists of an entablature and capital removed from Taylor’s 4p.c. Office on its demolition in 1815.?

3 SMPf.3/3, 4, 5, 12, 37, 494 The idea of new orders, based on forms derived from Nature had, however, been propagated by the Abbé Laugier in his Observations sur l’Architecture, 1765, Partvi. The idea of a central column supporting a radial vault may conceivably have been suggested to Dance by medieval chapter-houses (Westminster Abbey, Lincoln, Salisbury).

5 The only dated drawings after Chawner’s survey of November 1791 are those dated 1 March and 10 March 1792, from both of which it is obvious that the design was still fluid. However the Journal and the Day Book of the Soane office show that Soane’s pupils, Thomas Chawner and Frederick Meyer, had been engaged on drawings of the Bank Stock Office and that Soane had already submitted two sets of plans. On 21 and 22November 1791 Chawner was ‘drawing sections’ and on 23 November, Chawner and Meyer were ‘drawing section and plan of alterations’. On the following day ‘Mr. Soane took with him No. 4 sketches of designs for Bank Stock Office, viz. i plan, i plan showing the skylights, 1 longitudinal section and 1 latitudinal section’. On 1 December the Journal records that Soane was ‘at the Bank with plans and sections for alterations to Bank Stock Off.’. On 2 December Meyer was copying plans and sections and on 3 December Chawner and Meyer were ‘drawing sections’ while Chawner was ‘drawing a perspective’. On 6 December ‘Mr. Soane took No. 7 drawings of Bank Stock Office to the Bank’, viz. I perspective view, 1 longitudinal and 2 latitudinal sections, 2 plans and 1 ‘plan and section as it now is’. He also delivered a Report. On 7, 13 and 15 December both Meyer and Chawner were engaged on perspective views. No further drawings are recorded until 25 February 1792 when Chawner was making a ‘rough drawing’ and Meyer a section which engaged him again on 27 and 29. No drawings by pupils or clerks are recorded in March, the month when the design must have been finalized. The explanation for this is probably that the final working drawings were made in Soane’s office at the Bank of England and not at his house in Welbeck Street. The draughtsmen employed at the Bank in 1792 were William Lodder and Charles Ebdon and to them must probably be ascribed the highly finished set of sections and plans at various levels (Pf. 3/12,33,37,48 and Dr. 1, set4, No. 6) as well as the drawing for an under-floor heating scheme (Pf. 3/34-36) and a number of large-scale details of very high quality, many of which are not as executed (Pf. 3/39-47). In the Soane Museum is a wooden model (cf. Fig. 1), referred to in Soane’s office Day Book 1782-93, Saturday 23 February 1793: ‘The Bank about Model of the Stock Office 6 days Parkin’.

6 ‘Original Sketches’ (Soane cpd., shelfc(i)), Nos 170, 171, 173, 174, 176 and 177.

7 Stroud, D. George Dance (1791), p. 94 Google Scholar; pls2 and 25.

8 Ibid., pp. 113—15, 118; pis 36, 39a.

9 Wood, R. and Dawkins, J. Ruins of Palmyra (1753).Google Scholar The references, keyed to letters on the drawing, are noted as ‘C. Pal. pi. 51 and pi. 23’ (floriated panels) and ‘E. Pal. pi. 15 fret and pi. 19 fret’. Another reference reads ‘B. The Temple of the Winds with Variations’ but the relevance of this is obscure.

10 In France the use of fire-clay cones for vaults had already been recommended by the Comte d’Espie, Manière de rendre toutes sortes d’édifices incombustibles ou traité de la construction des voûtes faites avec des briques et du plâtre (Paris, 1754), a book noted by Laugier in the second edition of his Essai; see R. D. Middleton, Warburg Journal, xxvi (1963), 102.

11 This is not, strictly speaking, a Byzantine building, having been rebuilt by the Crusaders in the twelfth century. It may be described as Sicilian Romanesque on a Byzantine plan.

12 Soane had a coloured drawing made for his own lectures, 1809 onwards, based on Lebrun. SM Dr. 26, Set8. Soane exhibited the drawing as showing ‘the degraded state of the arts’ at the period.