Sir John Soane's Museum

This rambling, labyrinthine museum is well off the beaten track and this is the way staff like it. According to William Palin, the assistant curator, “we're too small to deal with crowds”.

The 19th- century home of Sir John Soane, the architect responsible for designing the neo- classical Bank of England, is unlike any other museum you are likely to visit. Ornaments and sculptures are crammed together in a riot of form and colour and the split- level floors (adventurous at the time), mirrors and narrow passageways make for a pleasantly disorienting effect.

But the real pleasure of this Holborn abode is the opportunity to immerse yourself in Soane's personal collection of art and antiquities. Paintings by Hogarth (The Rake's Progress and The Election), plaster casts of classical architectural fragments, and the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I (1279 BC) are all part of the menagerie.

Of all Soane's creations, this building gives the greatest insight into a man who saw architecture as “an art purely of invention”, and declared that “invention is the most painful and the most difficult exercise.”

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Contact Information

Sir John Soane's Museum
13 Lincoln
WC2A 3BP London

Tel. +442074052107

http://www.soane.org