FREE SOCIAL + FREE Sir John Soane's Museum London

Highlights Tour

The classic tour of the Museum, our Highlights Tour will transport you back to Regency London, taking you through Sir John Soane's extraordinary home, left as it was at the time of his death in 1837. This tour visits the Museum's main highlights and ventures into the Private Apartments.

Sir John Soane’s Museum is the extraordinary house and museum of the British architect Sir John Soane (1753-1837). On this page, discover the history of the Museum, its founder and its world class collections.

Sir John Soane was one of the foremost architects of the Regency era, a Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, and a dedicated collector of paintings, sculpture, architectural fragments and models, books, drawings and furniture.

Born in 1753, the fourth son of a bricklayer, his father’s professional links with architects and his own natural talent for drawing won him the opportunity to train as an architect. A talented and hard-working student, Soane was awarded the Royal Academy’s prestigious Gold Medal for Architecture, as a result receiving a bursary (funded by King George III) to undertake a Grand Tour of Europe. His travels to the ruins of Ancient Rome, Paestum and Pompeii would inspire his lifelong interest in Classical art and architecture.

Soane’s inventive use of light, space and his experimentation with the forms of Classical architecture earned him great success as an architect. During his career he won numerous high-profile projects, including the Bank of England (where he was architect for 45 years) and Dulwich Picture Gallery, and created his own extraordinary home and Museum on Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

His successes as an architect and his fascination with the history of architecture let to his appointment as Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy in 1806. Already an enthusiastic collector, he began to repurpose his home at Lincoln’s Inn Fields as a Museum for students of architecture.