Sir John Soane's Museum: The Alchemist's Labyrinth of Mirrors and Sarcophagi

Why is it significant?

Step into the intimate, dimly lit vestibule of number thirteen Lincoln's Inn Fields and prepare to enter an architectural wonderland unlike any other.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step into the intimate, dimly lit vestibule of number thirteen Lincoln's Inn Fields and prepare to enter an architectural wonderland unlike any other. As you navigate the labyrinth of narrow corridors, domed skylights cast dramatic spotlights onto thousands of marble busts, medieval corbels, and ingenious folding picture walls hung with William Hogarth's satiric masterpieces.

Sir John Soane, architect of the Bank of England, spent three decades transforming three adjoining Georgian townhouses into a living laboratory of light and perspective. In eighteen thirty-three, he successfully persuaded Parliament to pass a private Act preserving his house and collections precisely as they were at his death, untouched and open free to the public forever.

Descend into the subterranean Sepulchral Chamber: in the center rests the glowing white alabaster sarcophagus of Egyptian Pharaoh Seti the First, purchased by Soane in eighteen twenty-four after the British Museum foolishly refused to pay two thousand pounds for it.

Step back outside into the expansive green lawns of Lincoln's Inn Fields.