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  • image SM Vol 48/12

Reference number

SM Vol 48/12

Purpose

[53] Survey, Court of Common Pleas, 5 April 1823

Aspect

Plan of the basement level under the main (first) floor of the Court of Common Pleas

Scale

to a rough scale

Inscribed

Cellar under the Court of Common Pleas. / Wall of Court dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • 05/04/1823
    5th. April 1823.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pink wash, pen, on wove paper (211 x 272)

Hand

Arthur Patrick Mee (1802 - 1868), draughtsman
The Day Book entry for 5 April 1823 notes that Arthur Mee was making Sketches of the Courts / at Westmisnter.

Notes

The plan has been drawn over earlier pencil sketches, including a partial plan and a profile section of Gothic moulding, perhaps related to the same buildings. The plan shows the basement level immediately adjacent to the west wall of Westminster Hall, accessible via the pair of spiral staircases either side of the entrance arch.

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.

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).