| Code | DS/UK/565 |
| Surname | Soane |
| Forenames | John |
| PreTitle | Sir |
| Dates | 1753 - 1837 |
| Epithet | Architect |
| Activity | Sir John Soane was born on 10 September 1753, the son of John Soan, or Soane, a bricklayer at Goring-on-Thames near Reading. Nothing is known of his early upbringing, but in 1768 he entered the office of George Dance junior, the City Surveyor. In October 1771 he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. In 1772 he was taken on as an assistant at a salary of £60 a year by Henry Holland, then newly established practice in Mayfair; his engagement with Holland came to an end in 1778 when Soane was awarded the King's Travelling Studentship and set out for Italy. In Rome, besides studying architectural monuments, Soane made the acquaintance of Thomas Pitt, Lord Camelford, and of Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry (afterwards Earl of Bristol). Frederick Hervey offered him employment designing country houses in Ireland and Soane cut short his tour in order to follow him, but returned to England in June 1780 disappointed by the actual lack of professional opportunities in Ireland. In 1784 he married Elizabeth Smith, a niece of George Wyatt, a wealthy builder to whose property he succeeded in 1790.
His appointment to the Bank of England came in 1788; Soane resigned from the position in 1833 due to failing eyesight. He spent his last years writing a 'Description' of the House in Lincoln's Inn Fields which had been his home in 1812 and which he left to the Nation as a museum.
Information edited from Howard Colvin's 'A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840', pp. 765ff.
From 1788, Soane began to remodel and extend the existing Bank of England building, gradually replacing the existing structures by Sir Robert Taylor and others. This process continued until as late as 1833, by which time he had doubled its size to 3½ acres. He cannot have guessed in 1788 how lucrative and extensive his work there would be, for the expansion of the Bank was partly promoted by the fact that Pitt used it to raise funds to finance the Napoleonic wars. As well as handling the war debt, the bank also had to deal with the introduction of income tax in 1799 and of paper banknotes of low denominations in the same year.
Regarded as a major national monument, the Bank was illuminated on great public events such as the peace of Amiens in 1802, the visit to London of the allied sovereigns in 1814, and the battle of Waterloo in 1815. Following his visit to the Bank the Tsar gave Soane a ring, while the architect in turn presented him with drawings of the bank.
Information edited from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The structure of Soane's Bank of England remained more or less untouched until it was demolished and a new building erected by the architect Herbert Baker between 1925 - 1939. |
| Source | - Colvin, Howard 'A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840', John Murray Fifty Albemarle Street London 1978
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- Information on Bank of England Museum website:
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/museum/walkthrough/buildings.aspx
- Soane's drawings for the Bank of England in the Sir John Soane Museum:
http://www.soane.org/collections |
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