A glimpse of heaven at Sir John Soane's Museum

Architectural Drawings: Hidden Masterpieces from Sir John Soane’s Museum by Dr Frances Sands

Batsford Press, £35, 159 pages

"We’ll make heaven a place on earth,” crooned the songstress Belinda Carlisle. I wonder whether she’s ever visited the Sir John Soane Museum, in the heart of London, where, for people like me, that process has already begun.

13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields was certainly the Regency giant John Soane’s heaven on earth; his castle on a cloud, where he gathered his famous antiquarian ephemera and planned his own architectural schemes. It is crammed to the rafters with the fruits of Soane’s labours, and one can’t move without coming face-to-face with something of interest and loveliness.