Architect, historian, and television presenter Ptolemy Dean’s latest book on the work of Sir John Soane (1753–1837) constitutes a significant, intensely researched, and sumptuously illustrated contribution to the study of the late-Georgian British architect. Yet, as with many recent works on Soane, it also emanates something of the incense-filled air of a many-chambered and well-attended shrine wherein every scrap of paper, masonry, woodwork, or glazing that the great man might possibly have laid eyes on is consecrated for the reader’s study and admiration. Its value to Soane scholars and admirers is very tangible; its meaning to a wider public engaged with broader issues of architectural history and design is less immediately obvious.

Soane certainly was one of the era’s most talented designers, and he remains one of the profession’s great role models. Here was a man, of quite modest origins, who, through assiduous study and tireless work, rose to the top of both his field and the Regency intelligentsia. A friend and fishing partner of J.M.W. Turner, Soane held the sole professorship of architecture at the Royal Academy and numerous public or quasi-public surveyorships, including that of the Bank of England (from 1788 to 1833) and the position of Attached Architect to the Office of King’s Works (from 1814 to 1832). He also cultivated a wide and influential cadre of private clients, as Dean proficiently details in this book and his earlier, companion work, Sir John Soane and the Country Estate (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999).

The difficulty lies in the unfortunate fact that the great majority of Soane’s most interesting public and private commissions are long-since demolished or destroyed, leaving modern generations a handful of notable works to analyze and appreciate on their own terms. Soane was astute enough to plan for such an eventuality, however, and left his residence-cum-museum on London’s Lincoln Inn Fields to the nation upon his death. In a very conscious effort to shape the record of his work to be written by future generations, he assembled and edited in two interconnected townhouses of his own brilliant design his drawings, journals, account books, and correspondence; he also collected the drawings of colleagues such as George Dance, Jr. and the Adam brothers along with contemporary British painting and sculpture and a fascinating miscellany of Egyptian and Greco-Roman artifacts. While it seems possible for scholars of Hogarth or the Adamses to come and go from Sir John Soane’s Museum with their academic objectivity intact, for students of Soane it exercises a potent hypnotic force. Too often works on Soane are marked by a singular narrowness of focus, devoid of any attempt to place his accomplishments in a broader British, to say nothing of European, context. A chief factor is the sheer volume and detail of information that one encounters in the shadowy recesses of his museum. The pressure to publish hitherto unknown scraps and snatches about the great man can be inescapable when experienced within the Soanian diving bell on Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Such appears to have been the case with Dean’s research on Soane’s commissions within Greater London. As he notes in his preface, “with such a vast body of work, most of it lost or never built, the form of this book has had to adjust” (7). In addition to starting with the proposition that Soane’s two most significant London projects—the Bank of England and the Law Courts at Westminster—are both long demolished, his detailed research revealed that the vast majority of Soane’s London work consisted of “survey and valuation commissions that led to no further architectural work” (7). So with little of architectural import to discover, Dean is left to argue that this humdrum property-management work constituted a nexus of social and patronage connections that “were vital in the development of his practice as a whole” (7). Certainly, as a well-connected architect himself, Dean possesses a keen appreciation of the value of social networking to the ambitious designer. Indeed, it is possible to conceive that he could have provided a more significant contribution to Soane and late-Georgian studies by producing a study of Soane’s clients and patronage network and the marketing strategies he employed in his quest for public and private commissions—a kind of Regency architect’s guide to how to win friends and influence people, if you will.

Rather, Dean hewed to his original aim of replicating the format of Sir John Soane and the Country Estate in order to, in his words, “create a pair of books that might provide a broad coverage of Soane’s surviving work” (7). Sir John Soane and London consists of three parts: an introductory essay entitled “Sir John Soane’s London Practice,” nine short case studies, and a gazetteer and index of clients detailing 430 identifiable commissions within the metropolitan area.

Dean’s introductory essay provides a succinct and insightful overview of Soane’s life and work with a focus on his practice in Greater London. Dean breaks his survey down typologically, focusing on the largest component of Soane’s metropolitan work, townhouses, and then moving through commercial buildings, surveyorships, churches and mausoleums, and public buildings. The surveyorship category seems a misnomer since it is entirely dedicated to Soane’s work at the Bank of England, and his public surveyorships are discussed under public buildings. It is in discussing Soane’s private, residential commissions that Dean makes the most of his extensive research. He notes that in London alone Soane worked privately for at least fifteen of the Bank’s directors and that, given the interrelation of private, commercial, and even public clients, the most mundane of property-management tasks played a role in his careful cultivation and maintenance of patronage. Soane was adept at transforming straightforward property surveys into subsequent commissions, generally for renovations or additions but occasionally for demolition and new construction. While Dean’s background as a designer may not equip him to integrate Soane’s work into broader historical or architectural contexts, it does enable him to bring a sharp eye and keen analytical intellect to bear on Soane’s design process and the relative merits of the bits and pieces of his work that survive. Dean traces the evolution of certain Soanian traits—such as bombes, strigilated railings, or, more fundamentally, his remarkable finesse at planning and lighting effects—as they weave through commissions in town and country for a Regency who’s who of clients.

Therefore, the most satisfying section of Sir John Soane and London are the nine, typologically varied short case studies, which Dean has thoughtfully selected to focus on extant commissions “where something can still be seen and experienced” (7). These detail the design, construction, and twenty-first-century state of five structures or complexes: two of the three townhouses on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields that now compose Sir John Soane’s Museum; the Dulwich Picture Gallery in the South London suburb of that name; Soane’s work at the Royal Hospital Chelsea; St. Peter’s Church in the gritty southeastern neighborhood of Walworth; and the fragments of Soane’s public and private work left at the heart of Britain’s executive branch at the Board of Trade and Privy Council Offices on Whitehall and Nos. 10 and 11 Downing Street. True to Dean’s architect’s mindset, each of the case studies starts with an informative listing of client, clerk of works (project architect in U.S. terms), craftsmen, architect’s fee, total costs, and present owner. The studies themselves provide concise summaries of Soane’s work and insightful analyses of his design process. Moreover, they are excellently illustrated with drawings from the Soane Museum, historic photographs, sharp contemporary black-and-white photographs, and Dean’s own distinctive, scintillating watercolor views, which are reproduced in a section separating the case studies from the gazetteer. Dean’s studies of Soane’s various works at Chelsea, St. Peter’s Church, and his great frustrations and small triumphs on Whitehall and Downing Street present the most substantial treatment of these projects to date as well as convincing arguments for Soane’s ability to turn the most meager and difficult of projects into significant works of interior, if not exterior, architecture.

Dean’s gazetteer occupies the last third of Sir John Soane and London and details 430 commissions within Greater London. This represents a more than three-fold increase since Dorothy Stroud’s previously authoritative listing in her monograph, Sir John Soane Architect, last revised in 1996 (London: Giles de la Mare Publishers, 1996). While Dean’s gazetteer does constitute, as Gillian Darley notes in her foreword, “an astonishing record of the sheer volume of Soane’s practice” (9), the great majority of the new entries are for survey and valuation work that, as Dean admits, “led to no further architectural work” (9). In other words, what Dean’s gazetteer presents is a detailed record of the routine and banal underpinnings of Soane’s professional practice—his proto-modern drudgery as real estate agent, property manager, and errand boy. Nevertheless, the comprehensive insistency of Dean’s research is clearly displayed in each listing’s summary of references from Soane’s journals, notebooks, and account books along with a text summarizing the source or significance of the client, the extent of Soane’s work, and its current status. These texts also demonstrate Dean’s exhaustive on-site investigations; however, the relatively few photographs in the gazetteer once again underline the fact that “all those Saturdays” away from his wife uncovered little of architectural import. Sir John Soane and London ends with a very useful index of clients in which Dean has indicated both which commissions were only surveys or valuations and which clients also commissioned country-house work from Soane. The significant relationships laid bare in these four pages gives one hope that now that Dean has brought forth the minutiae of Soane’s metropolitan practice from the recesses of the Soane Museum perhaps he or others can distill from them the essence of Soane’s contribution to the making of the modern metropolis.