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  • image SM 73/3/4
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Reference number

SM 73/3/4

Purpose

[2] Survey drawing taken by Thomas Dove, 1788

Aspect

The Ground Plan of the Castle and Shire House in the City of Norwich

Scale

scale bar of 1/9 inch to one foot

Inscribed

as above, labelled The Shire House, Entrance, The Keyturners / Room, Stairs to Upper Gaol, The long / Ward, The Strong / Hold, Debtors Yard, Pump, The Old Building, The Bath House, The Felons Yard, Pump, Privy, The Chapel, Stairs to the / Sick Room (Soane, pencil) North, East, West, Chapel, Area, (Soane, pencil) North, East, West and a few dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • Thos Dove / 1788

Medium and dimensions

Pen and sepia wash, pricked for transfer on laid paper with two old repairs (420 x 585)

Hand

Thomas Dean, surveyor

Watermark

J Whatman, fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche and below, ornate W

Notes

This survey drawing was made by Thomas Dove, of whom not much is presently known. Norfolk County Record Office has two drawings signed by him and dated 1786 for a new bridewell (prison, house of correction) and a further drawing for alterations and additions to the existing bridewell after a fire (NCR case 1be/100-102). These last were carried out by Dove; the bridewell is now the Bridewell Museum in Bridewell Alley, Norwich.

Soane's office "Journal No1' has an entry for 13 May 1789: 'surveyed Castle'. Presumably he took with him Dove's survey drawings, no doubt originally made for the Norwich City Corporation.

This drawing and SM 73/3/5 of Dove's survey have on their versos copies of Soane's elevations (cf. SM 73/3/8 'Entrance Front' and 'Longitudinal Elevation' dated 6 June 1789). While the drawing paper is of the type used by Soane's office at this time, it is presumed (from the dating) that Soane's office re-used Dove's drawings rather than the other way round. Both drawings show the keep to measure about 90 by 95 feet and 60 (sic) feet high. The ground floor of the four-storey building is entirely given over as a prison and there are 'Stairs to the Upper Gaol'. The walls are between nine and twelve feet thick including two internal walls towards the south-east. To the right is the two-storey, embattled front elevation of Brettingham's Shire Hall stepped back by about 15 feet from the keep.

Literature

N. Pevsner and B. Wilson, Norfolk 1: Norwich and north-east, 2nd ed.,1997, pp.256-60

Level

Drawing

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

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

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).