The master left without masterpieces

Sir John Soane is London’s lost architect. You can visit his museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the picture gallery he designed at Dulwich. But since his death in 1837 his greatest masterpieces have gone. The Victorians demolished the law courts at Westminster, and the glittering royal entrance to the House of Lords. The RAC club-house stands on the site of the Marquis of Buckingham’s palace on Pall Mall. His Bank of England was demolished in the 1920s —– to Nikolaus Pevsner the city’s greatest loss of the 20th century.

Happily, this book by the architect Ptolemy Dean brings into the balance a multiplicity of new discoveries. It is the companion piece to Sir John Soane and the Country Estate which he published in 1999. In the six years since, he has researched Soane’s London, at the same time as becoming the face of Restoration, the most popular series on architecture in television history.

The first half of the book has detailed studies of ten major projects, such as the house and museum, Dulwich picture gallery and the additions to the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. The second half is a gazetteer with the facts and figures of 400 recorded commissions.

In his first book Dean explained how Soane applied the classical principles of axis and symmetry to country houses and their estate buildings, and illustrated his personal experiments in light and space. This book analyses how he applied the same principles to the narrow, cluttered streets of London. At No. 10 Downing Street, for example, he inserted the sail-vaulted dining-room in which Tony Blair holds his press conferences. But — and Dean makes us look hard at the ground-plans — the drama of the backdrop is the consequence of ruthless ingenuity behind the scenes.