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.