I remember being hauled as a grumbling child by my granny along to No. 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I found myself unexpectedly delighted by the sweet, rich smell of beeswax and ingenious wooden wall panels that concealed a layer of hidden paintings. This was my first taste of Sir John Soane’s Museum, an elegant, quirky and utterly seductive Georgian townhouse near Holborn in London. In fact, No.13 is the filling in a sandwich of three houses built by the madcap architect Soane to house his family, his staff, his pet dog Fanny and his increasingly unwieldy collection of major and lesser works of art, curios, furniture, marbles and architectural ornamentation.
Even then, I was never much of a one for the classical statuary (except for what rather disappointingly lay beneath Apollo Belvedere’s fig leaf), but the Hogarth paintings, A Rake’s Progress and An Election, were (and are) fantastic – busting out with colour and satire and rude bits. I still always head for them first.
Depending on who you listen to, Soane was a genius, irascible, a control-freak, litigious and generally short on laughs. As an architect, among other edifices, we have him to thank for the red telephone box, inspired by his burial vault at St Pancras Old Church, and the Bank of England building. Not much else remains in London. Luckily, Soane very sensibly ensured his place in posterity by bequeathing his home and its contents to the nation, at the same time neatly disinheriting a son he didn’t get on with.
And what a legacy the man has left us. Stuffed to the gills with treasures from around the world, each painstakingly documented and arranged by Soane, the house yields the randomness of a crypt: a bright yellow drawing room, a sarcophagus, an astronomical clock, a tombstone inscribed “Alas Poor Fanny”, replica Axminster carpets, Gothic carvings, 30,000 drawings, 7,000 books, Sir Robert Walpole’s desk, works by Turner, Canaletto, Reynolds, Watteau and… a pair of leg irons.
In short, like Sir John Soane himself, the museum is utterly brilliant, faintly bonkers and simply demands closer attention. Sometimes there’s a bit of a queue, but it’s always worth the wait (and it’s free). See it in natural daylight and then go again to a candlelit evening (held on the first Tuesday of every month). Just one word of warning – don’t try to sit down in the gloom. There’s a carefully placed thistle on every chair.
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