The Sir John Soane’s Museum has launched a national appeal for donations towards its £6.3m Opening Up the Soane project - supported by TV presenter and historian Dan Cruickshank, who is a passionate advocate of the museum.
Grants totalling £1.6m have already been donated to the world-famous house-museum, after it failed to secure a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £3.3m in June 2008. Just one day after the HLF rejection, the Monument Trust donated £1m – the largest single donation from an independent charitable trust that the museum has ever received.
Raising money from outside sources is vital, as Soane's liberal request in 1833 was that entry to the museum should always be free, so money cannot be raised in this way.
“This appeal is a gauntlet – a challenge thrown down at the feet of everyone who loves Soane’s strange and idiosyncratic creation and who wants it to survive,” said Tim Knox, Soane Museum Director.
Receiving nearly 93,000 visitors in 2007 alone, the museum is in danger of erosion. As well as securing the museum’s existence into the 21st century, the Opening Up project will expand the magical museum’s collections.
As a great Neoclassical architect, Soane built his house-museum in 1812, continually filled it with his collections of books, pictures and sculptures, and stipulated that it be preserved in the exact state he left it on his death.
Soon after his death, however, the need to accommodate museum staff forced the curators to dismantle some of the upper rooms and rationalise Soane’s crowded displays.
Dismantled rooms containing hundreds of artefacts will be restored through the Opening Up project. Buying back the building next door (number 14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields) freed up the museum’s second floor (at number 13).
Recreated areas of this floor include Soane’s Bedchamber and bathroom, and the Book Passage, which is lined with mirrored bookcases and contains a case of mummified cats.
Inspirational to architects for its use of light and space, as well as the spooky darkness of its crypt, architect Edward Jones, said: “It is the London house pushed to phantasmagorical limits.”
Linking a series of fifteen interventions, the Opening Up project will increase public access to unseen parts of the house and collections; improve visitor circulation; create better access for people with disabilities; increase the potential for income generation and improve the way the museum’s buildings and collections are cared for.
The museum will remain open throughout the restoration and expansion project, which aims to be completed by 2012.
