Bevis Hillier

Shrine of a connoisseur

Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, by Tim Knox, photographs by Derry Moore

issue 11 April 2009

Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, by Tim Knox, photographs by Derry Moore

Sir John Soane’s Museum is very nearly a folly — a mad grotto in the midst of Georgian London. It is clearly the monument of someone both eccentric and egocentric. What saves it from being Hearst Castle, Liberace’s palace or Michael Jackson’s Neverland, is that its creator was a great architect — the Bank of England was his masterpiece.

In the early 1790s Soane and his rich wife bought No.

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