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. 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The house was rebuilt to Soane’s designs, and they moved there in 1794. This book, with its fine, atmospheric photographs by Derry Moore and the deftly informative text by the museum’s director, Tim Knox, leads us on a delightful tour of the building which Soane left to the nation. It is so vivid that you could almost spare yourself the trouble of going there; but then you would miss the surprise and revelation that I first enjoyed as a child — when an attendant folds out the hinged panels (‘planes’ they are called, I learn from the book) bearing paintings by Hogarth.
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