Our Glorious Heritage: The Ruins of Sir John Soane

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The architect Sir John Soane was fascinated by ruins - as many architects must be, ruins being both an inspiration and a warning ("This is how the stuff you build is going to end up"). In the grounds of his country house, Pitshanger Manor at Ealing, he built a mock ruin, with broken walls and buried columns, and announced to the press the discovery of the remains of a Roman temple. At the back of his house at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields he built the "Monk's Yard", supposedly the cell of a medieval hermit called Padre Giovanni, but actually some fragments from the ruined Palace of Westminster, which Soane was rebuilding.

At that time, in the first decades of the 19th century, …