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  • image SM 53/6/13

Reference number

SM 53/6/13

Purpose

[407] Alternative design, Westminster Hall and New Law Courts, 22 May 1824

Aspect

Elevation of the New Law Courts, with the Court of King's Bench refaced in Gothic with corner turrets, and a corresponding Record Building to the east of Westminster Hall, from New Palace Yard looking south, unexecuted

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

View of a Design for Gothicising the exterior of the Court of King's Bench, and for a / corresponding Building eastward of Westminster Hall to contain the Records of the Exchequer &c.

Signed and dated

  • 22/05/1824
    22d. May 1824

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, coloured washes including raw sienna, Payne's grey and sepia, pen, on wove paper (537 x 438)

Hand

Soane Office, draughtsman

Watermark

Weatherley & Lane / 1818

Notes

This appears to be an ornamented variant on the proposal shown in SM 53/8/59. Here, the corner turrets are retained, but a recessed attic storey serves to unify the façades' profiles. Niches have been introduced between the first-floor windows; both areas show erasures and revisions. An engaged arcade of Tudor arches was also tried on the ground floor, but subsequently erased. The appearance recalls something of Tom Quad at Christ Church, Oxford.

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).