Chasing Soane and Hogarth across London

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A man in a pink tail coat and a black top hat opens the door to me. A quick sniffer-tool probe in my bag and I’m in to the room with all the gold. There it is, in great fat slabs like rich-boys’ toffee.

A neat round hole in the thick glass of a display case allows me to poke a forefinger in and touch the fat buttery surface of £70,000. My damp fingerprint fades reluctantly.

They are rather keen on gold at the Bank of England. In their museum they have Roman ingots, stretched and twined like barley-sugar twists, and Japanese bullion crafted into Yin and Yang bars, in an effort, presumably, to balance more than the books.

But I’m not here for the money. I’ve come to this great white stone, windowless monument to cash to satisfy my curiousity about its architect, Sir John Soane who, from 1788, spent 45 years of his life on the old Lady of Threadneedle Street. For him the building became “the pride and boast of my life”.

He had other prides and boasts. There is his other great creation, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and his two houses, the London home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the ‘country’ villa, now subsumed into suburban Ealing. And there were other friends and connections, which I would string together into a leisurely Soane-themed amble half way across London.

But I wandered first through Soane’s Bank Stock Office, a high, cream, coolly elegant oval shaped hall, lit from above and with curving mahogany counters around the walls like a rather superior bank in a county town. Infact its not exactly as Soane had it built in the late 18th century. They knocked the lot down in the Twenties when the whole of the bank site was redeveloped, but had the decency to rebuild this room in exact accordance with the original plans.

There is a little more Soane to see in the other main room of the museum, the 1930s Rotunda with, in the centre of the room, a display case of gold ingots piled up like profiterloes, or Ferrero Rocher chocolates. Ambassador? Eccellente!.

Around the room are draped female figures, or caryatids, helping support the domed, glazed roof. These are Soane originals, rescued from the demolition. They look as if they have a weight on their minds.

My second Soane spot was just four stops away on the Central Line at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he bought three adjacent houses in the tall, grey brick terrace on the north side of the square and spent several decades creating a unique family home in which to house his remarkable collection of architectural artifacts.

It’s a house of incredible richness, from the Pompeian red of the ground floor dining room and library, to the sunshine yellow if the first floor drawing rooms with their loggia extending the length of the house. Soane created a magical illusion of space by placing mirrors behind exhibits, above bookcases, in recesses alongside fireplaces and then packed every nook and crany with books, paintings and his vast collection of architectural fragments. Every cranny has been used, from the niche in a turn of the stars which is designated the Shakespeare Recess to the corridor which doubles as a tiny study.

With the ingenious use of great hinged panels a room the size of a lift becomes a picture gallery in which the works of art are fanned out before you, as if on the pages of a giant book. And what works. Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress is here - the tale of a young man’s fall, from inheritance to madhouse, in eight canvases. In another tiny picture room the size of a council flat kitchen are no fewer than three Canalettos.

This wasn’t always a happy house. After his wife died prematurely he described it as “the mansion of woe.” Soane had hoped to found a dynasty of architects, but neither of his sons - George and John - were interested. The dissolute George, indeed, ridiculed his father’s architecture in two spiteful newspaper articles. Soane believed these were the “death blows” which killed his wife.

The sons scowl from a portrait in the otherwise sun-filled first floor drawing room, looking not unlike the Rake in the series of paintings downstairs

My Soane-inspired route west took me close to Hogarth’s country house, and I got off the tube at Turnham Green to make a detour for it.

If you have ever driven into London on the A4, and negotiated that landmark of automotive misery, the Hogarth Roundabout, you will have passed the house. When Hogarth bought this rustic, homely and now cruelly mis-placed old farmhouse in 1749 it was to provide a place of retreat from London for his last 15 summers.

Today, despite the fact that four lanes of traffic blares right past its door, a high wall ensures, rather miraculously, that the garden, dominated by the 400 year old mulbery tree beneath which Hogarth used to sit, is still an oasis of calm.

Once, Soane’s own country house was just a few fields and a bend in the River Thames away. Today it is a grind out through the suburbs. As I made the journey I pondered on how I first became aware of Soane. It was the first week I had moved into a house in Ealing. And the front page lead on the local paper was how three local men had staged an abortive armed raid on Soane’s Lincoln’s Inn house. The police were waiting for them, and one of the would-be robbers was shot dead That man, I learned from the paper, had lived in the very street I had just moved in to.

Did those raiders know of their target’s local connection? Who knows. But it is a strange coincidence that, if they had walked to one corner of the remnants of Ealing’s village green, they would have seen Pitshanger House, which Soane bought in 1800 and turned into his ideal vision of a Regency Villa, enhancing its yellow brick facade with four towering columns topped my caryatids rather like the ones holding up the roof of the Bank of England. Except that, here, they had nothing but sky above their heads.

Pitshanger Manor has had its ups and downs. The grounds are now Walpole Park, and until the Eighties the house was the town library. But now half a dozen rooms have been beautifully recreated, often with reference to water colours showing original furnishings dating from 1802.

The other imposing thing about the place is the arched gateway. I’d seen that gateway dozens of times, long before I moved to Ealing or heard about John Soane. And the reason for that is a little further down the green, in a whitewashed thirties building which bears the name Ealing Studios.

This was was not just the home to the Ealing Comedy of the Thirties, Forties and Fifites, but also to much of the BBCs drama and comedy output, from Steptoe and Son to Monty Python. Indeed, it still is. And, down the decades, if ever a director wanted an imposing gateway to film a Rolls Royce purring through, or a mansion for a character to emege from, they popped next door to this place.

The studios are only infrequently open to the public, but across the green is a pub called the Red Lion, which has always been the local for cast and crew.

I finished my journey here, casting an eye over the framed photographs which cover the walls. There was Jack Hawkins, looking terribly British in the uniform of a naval officer, Gina Bellman pouting in Dennis Potter’s Blackeyes and old man Steptoe, Wilfred Bramble, leering away. And I noticed that he had a look in his eye rather like that of the Rake, and of Soane’s dissolute son. What a trio. As Sir John Soane probably never said, but as Harold Steptoe might have: “Fah-vah, do try to behave properly.”




Factbox

All four museums are free. Bank of England Museum, Threadneedle Street, open Mon to Fri 10 - 5.
Sir John Soane’s Museum, 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London WC2A 3BP open Tue to Sat 10 - 5, first Tuesday evening each month, 6 - 9.
Hogarth’s ouse, Great West Road, London W4 2QN, open Tues to Fri, 1 - 5., Sat and Sun 1 - 6.
Pitshanger manor, Mattock lane, Ealing W5 5EQ, open Tues to Sat 10 - 5.