Soane Museum Study Group – Wednesday 26 February 2025 – Frances Sands

The Soane Museum Study Group is an open forum for scholars – both established and emerging – to present new research into an aspect of architectural history and/or Soane’s collection.

Frances Sands – Travels of the mind: travel literature at Sir John Soane’s Museum

On arrival please come to no. 14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The door will be staffed from 6.00pm, with the event starting at 6.30pm.

Ticket price: £6

About the talk

In recent months our speaker, Frances Sands, has been considering the large but previously ignored collection of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century travel literature at Sir John Soane’s Museum. Among the 7,000 books collected by Soane, almost 1,000 of these offer travelogues, treatises, guides, histories, tours, descriptions and observations on foreign countries and cultures, as well as collected letters from abroad, poems and fiction detailing foreign countries, and books offering instruction in foreign languages. Many of these pertain to countries and cultures which Soane would never experience. Given that Soane’s collecting was motivated by his role as an architectural educator, and his Museum was formed to create his ‘academy of architecture’, why did he collect so many books dealing with foreign places which did not obviously serve his architectural purposes? This paper will consider why Soane collected this genre of publication; what this sub-category of Soane’s collection encompasses; and offer some highlights from among that corpus.

A selection of travel literature from the Soane Museum collection will be on display at the end of the talk.

Dr Frances Sands is the Curator of Drawings and Books at Sir John Soane’s Museum where she has worked since 2010.