It could be said that it is, in large measure the marks and decisions made by individuals, rather than those of a larger ‘society’ that have defined London’s urbanity.

This has resulted in a city of such scale and evenness of grain that it can, arguably, only be understood at the level of such individual experience. It is a city of fragments, where the figure becomes subsumed by the immensity of the ground; a city that might be understood as much in time as in space.

Two buildings by one of the greatest of London’s architects, Sir John Soane, eloquently describe this elision of scales. One, many of us will know intimately, the other can exist only in our imaginations – in itself this seems an appropriate metaphor for the wider condition.

Soane, who lived from 1753 to 1837, exemplified that period’s fascination with time and the fragment - the archaeological artefact and the ruin. His house in Lincolns Inn Fields, on which he began working in 1808, was in part a repository. Its spaces were defined in response to the enormous collection of artefacts from around the world, which he amassed during his lifetime. The house itself can be understood as a construction formed of a series of fragments, comparable to its contents. It might be described as a constructed archaeology, extended and adjusted over time, through excavation and expansion into neighbouring plots, as opportunity presented itself. Intriguingly, the resultant sequence of intensely personal spaces, defined through an individual obsession, became at some point in Soane’s own thinking, public. In 1833 he obtained the act of Parliament, through which the house was designated a museum and its contents were preserved for the nation.

Soane’s house suggests a world experienced through a series of condensed fragments. His designs for the Bank of England, upon which he worked for much of his career, describe how these transformed to become a building that more directly encompassed the idea of the city.

Intellectually, Soane was powerfully engaged with the idea of the monumental. John Summerson describes how the funerary monuments of his private collection dwelt in his imagination. The form of the enlarged stone cinerary urn lid, which caps his self designed tomb, in St Pancras Gardens, became inverted in the Breakfast Room ceiling under which he started his day. This private compulsion once again re-emerged, at a different and very public scale, impressed upon the skyline of the Bank.

Yet as a whole, rather than presenting itself as a monumental object, a figure in ground, the Bank instead offered a sense that building and city, foreground and background, had become intertwined. Like his house, its exterior was largely undemonstrative. Complexity and monumentality instead become introverted and internalised. Perhaps simply as a result of time and circumstance, the plan accreted rather than being prefigured. It came to fill its plot and described a scale, grain and complexity that was as physically conditioned by the city in which it stood, as its programme was to condition that city’s future prosperity.

Soane’s Bank no longer survives, but this reading of it as ‘city’ remains powerfully apparent in J.M. Gandy’s famous painting of it as a ruin, incidentally prefiguring the building’s actual ruination by German bombs and held within his house at Lincoln’s Inn. Painted just prior to the first phase of his reconstruction, it depicts the bank in a manner inspired by Pompeii - an extraordinary picture, it is at once, a survey, a speculation and a ruin, suggesting a physicality that can only be understood through the past, present and future, simultaneously…at this moment it has become, perhaps, London itself.