NORTH WEST PASSAGE

This was written 3 months ago, before I went to Tuscany and got carried away by a new obsession.  My conscience is nagging and I want to pick up the Bank of England model again.  Anyway here is a report of where things stood in March/April …  “Open quotes”

Recent work has centred around Soane’s North West Extension.  Perhaps now is a good time to present an overview of this phase of the Bank’s development in the context of the whole scheme.  Right at the beginning of the Project Soane adventure I decided to invent a grid to act as a skeleton and allow the various spaces to be constructed to regular dimensions.  This is necessarily a fictitious abstraction but it really was the only way to prevent the work from becoming totally  chaotic.

There are three overlapping grid systems, coded as AB, CD & EF.  The individual grids then are numbered as A1, A2, A3 etc.  Clearly some walls are set at fractions of a degree to the grid, but we have resisted the temptation to introduce these…

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