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  • Sir John Soane's Museum

  • Until Aug 21 2010
  • Sir John Soane's Museum, 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, WC2A 3BP

  • By Lisa Mullen

    Posted: Mon Sep 10 2007

  • The Soane Museum is one of the treasures of London: crammed with art, books and antiquities collected by Sir John Soane in the nineteenth century, and preserved, by Act of Parliament, for the benefit of ‘amateurs and students’ in architecture, painting and sculpture. You shouldn’t need an excuse to visit this wonderfully atmospheric piece of old London but, in case you do, a new exhibition, ‘Vaulting Ambition’, will give you all the reason you need. It tells the story of the capital’s first ‘celebrity architects’, the Adam brothers, and is crammed with fascinating detail culled from the large collection of Adam drawings and papers held by the museum, as well as other material borrowed from private collections and never seen in public before.

    The Adams’ vision is still stamped on to the London cityscape in the form of our beloved Georgian terraces, which they helped to popularise. But the brothers’ influence as entrepreneurs is almost as great as their design legacy; they pioneered the kind of high-end property development which has been vital to the evolution of the city. William Adam & Company was established in 1764 and named after the brothers’ father, a renowned stonemason and designer of country houses in his own right, who had died two decades previously. It was his second son, Robert Adam, who was the architectural genius of the family, though. Having completed his formal education with a ‘grand tour’ of Europe, Robert returned to Britain with his mind, and his notebooks, crammed with Greek and Roman ruins. In this, he was at the cutting edge of architectural fashion and he was determined to promote the white-hot neo-classical style which was to prove so refreshing to a generation growing tired of  twiddly baroque and rococo embellishments.

    It wasn’t just the Adam company’s espousal of clean lines and starkly geometric elevations which made it so modern. Bob Adam, his elder brother Jamie and younger sibling Willy, were ambitious. They wanted to make big money; and the best way of doing that, they realised, was to control every aspect of the build, from the supply of raw materials to the style of furnishings in the finished product. They even had their own strategy for promoting the finished product. If the eighteenth century had been plagued by the kind of crass phraseology we have to contend with now, the Adams might have claimed to offer total property development solutions.

    Their first grand design was a groundbreaking project which they called The Adelphi, after the Greek word for ‘brothers’, adelphoi. When they bought it, Durham Yard was a rundown piece of Westminster brownfield which had once housed the bishops of Durham but had degenerated into a slum area which the Duke of St Albans was happy to offload. Only the Adams saw the potential of its location and the usefulness of its bankside location, which could provide wharves to service their new properties. The Adelphi included one terrace on the Thames, another nearer to the Strand, and a ladder of streets in between. Although most of the development was demolished in the 1930s, the drawings in the Soane exhibition  show how striking these buildings were.

    Moreover, Robert had  intricate ceiling designs and chimney pieces ready to woo potential purchasers, and further designs for all the necessities of a civilised Georgian existence, including a fashionable church and sentry boxes t o help the wealthy inhabitants feel safe in their palatial new homes. They even installed ‘anchor tenants’ to make the investment seem attractive to London’s wealthy elite.

    All this business acumen and careful preparation couldn’t protect them from the turbulence of London’s fledgling financial infrastructure, though. Like plenty of modern property developers, the Adam brothers were caught out by a market crash. A poor crop harvest across Europe caused the Ayr Bank in Scotland to collapse in 1772, triggering the Bank of England to fail in its turn. Suddenly London’s rich were cash poor, and no one was in the lending business. In the end, the Adams ran a lottery to divest themselves of the Adelphi, and still managed to turn a profit. But the stress of their predicament caused a family rift which never really healed.

    The brothers remained professionally undaunted, however, and went on to set up similarly ambitious developments in Portland Place and Fitzroy Square, both of which are also featured in the exhibition. And if you want to see a little of what the brothers left to twenty-first century London, have a look at John Adam Street and Robert Street near the Strand. If you want to be immortal in this city, building your own street isn’t a bad way to go about it.
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