Scale
not to scale
Inscribed
Court of Common Pleas / The / Judges Room / BENCH / The Court, Passage leading into Westminster Hall / [pointing hand] / A / The Serjeants Room. / These two were / only half Closets. / No depth in the / shaded parts. / Watercloset / A concealed / Bed / Leading to the Upper - / Rooms / B / Sky-light / Water / closet / The Judges Clerks Room., C, Used by Mr. Lewis, / as a general / Family Room. / D / Used as a / Bedroom / E / Used as a Kitchen / and Servants / sleeping Room. / A Sketch of a Plan and Elevation of / the Apartments occupied by the Custos / Brevium in the Year 1821. / All the Presses are 20 Inches deap. / The Rooms D and E are immediately / over the Judges Room, and square with / it. / numbering sequence 1 - 66.
Signed and dated
- 24/10/1822
dated in accordance with SM 37/3/11A.
Medium and dimensions
Pen, on wove paper (572 x 481)
Hand
This is not in a Soane office hand.
Watermark
J Whatman / Turkey Mill / 1821
Notes
This was one of two plans enclosed with, and referred to in, Humphreys's letter to Soane of 24 October 1824. In the inscription, the numbering sequence 1 - 66 denotes presses for storing Common Pleas records, and runs consecutively across all three fold-out plans. The hand corresponds with Humphreys's letter (SM 37/3/11A). Given its highly diagramatic nature, this plan would have been of little architectural value to Soane. As naïve as this plan is it does demonstrate the responses to Soane's initial enquiries regarding existing plans amongst the separate officials of the Law Courts.
Level
Drawing
Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation.
This catalogue of Soane’s designs for the New Law Courts was generously funded by The Worshipful Company of Mercers and The Pilgrim Trust.
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).
