The restored Model Room at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, with the Pompeii model on its original ‘cake stand’ display.Photography © Michael Bodiam

In November 1836, less than three months before he died, the architect Sir John Soane put his personal papers — letters, business correspondence and accounts connected to his architectural practice — into the drawers and cupboards of his house at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields and sealed them up, leaving instructions that they were not to be opened for 30, 50 and, in some cases, 60 years. It was a final stage in the preparations for his legacy, which he’d begun almost 30 years earlier, when he had bought the house and drawn up the first plans to turn it into a museum.

“The acquisition of number 13 came quite soon after Soane was made professor of architecture at the Royal Academy,” says Helen Dorey, who is deputy director of the museum and its current Inspectress — a title written into the 1833 Act of Parliament that secured Soane’s house and its contents as a public museum after his death. “It’s quite clear from his writings that the reason he wanted to acquire this larger building next door [to his first house at number 12] was specifically to start making his collections available, initially to those RA students. Even in 1812, the year he’s completing his rebuilding of number 13, the house is described as ‘an academy of architecture’ in the press.”.....Continue Reading

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