Half-Wrecked

Mary Beard

• John Soane: An Accidental Romantic by Gillian Darley
  Yale, 358 pp, £25.00, September 1999, ISBN 0 300 08165 0
• John Soane, Architect: Master of Space and Light by Margaret Richardson and Mary-Anne Stevens
  Royal Academy, 302 pp, £45.00, September 1999, ISBN 0 300 01895 9
• Sir John Soane and the Country Estate by Ptolemy Dean
  Ashgate, 204 pp, £37.50, October 1999, ISBN 1 84014 293 6

Tombs do not rank high in the history of modern architecture. Only two grave monuments in London have been designated as Grade One Listed Buildings: the icon of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, and the aggressively idiosyncratic construction that is the memorial to the family of Sir John Soane (‘architect to the Bank of England &c &c &c’, as the inscription proclaims) in the burial ground next to Old St Pancras Church – the romantic spot where Shelley first caught sight of Mary Godwin, but now part of some lugubrious gardens sandwiched between the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, the mainline railway and St Pancras Coroner’s Court. ‘Listing’ has done little to protect either monument. Predictably perhaps, Marx’s tomb has suffered over the years from the hammers and spray guns of both enemies and friends. But Soane’s has fared even worse; not, I imagine, at the hands of desperate architectural ideologues, but from run-of-the-mill vandals, attracted by its sheer oddity. When I visited it in January, it was overrun by brambles; much of its balustrading had been kicked away; its four white marble columns had long since been heaved off (the nearby railway line their likely destination); and the temporary metal fence surrounding it was more of an eyesore than a protection.