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  • image SM volume 76/56

Reference number

SM volume 76/56

Purpose

[125] Site record drawing of the old stables, 25 April 1815

Aspect

View of the Front of the Clerk of the Works' house and Old Stables / as they stood previously to the alterations, Chelsea Hospital

Inscribed

as above

Signed and dated

  • April 25th. 1815

Hand

Soane office

Notes

C.G.T. Dean describes the old stables pictured here: 'At the entrance the roofs were hipped, and there were brick piers capped by stone balls, with cannon let into the ground at their outer corners. Inside the yard there were ubb'd arches over the Doors and Windows on the ground floor, and lucerne, or wooden dormers, to the attics. A row of five workshops with lodgings overhead stood next the main road, and somewhat larger premises for the carpenter on the opposite side of the yard.'

Dean adds that 'The old Stable-yard was built mainly in 1692-4, though additions were made between then and 1698. It was more than double the size of the present yard, and provided stabling for thirty-six horses, three of which were for the Governor.'

The old stable yard was demolished as a result of the construction of the neighbouring new Infirmary. In order for the Infirmary to have the space and ventilation necessary, the stables site was eventually moved (post Infirmary) to a new site, to the west of the latter.

This drawing also shows the old Clerk of Work's house, which is discussed in the notes to SM volume 76/54, SM volume 76/55 and SM volume 76/58 of the next section.

Literature

C.G.T. Dean, The Royal Hospital, Chelsea, 1950, p.115-116

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).