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  • image SM 53/6/15

Reference number

SM 53/6/15

Purpose

[447] Alternative design, Westminster Hall and New Law Courts, early April 1824

Aspect

Exterior perspective of Westminster Hall with flanking Gothic ranges to the east and west, returning on the eastern side of New Palace Yard, from the north west, unexecuted

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

No 16

Signed and dated

  • 01/04/1824 - 15/04/1824
    dated in accordance with SM 53/8/58

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, coloured washes of sepia, burnt sienna and Payne's grey, within single ruled border on wove paper (600 x 460)

Hand

Soane Office, draughtsman

Watermark

Weatherley & Lane

Notes

For this proposal, the vantage point is an elevated one taken at the junction of Bridge Street with St Margaret's Street; the corner of Garden Square visible in the foreground. The arches of the Royal Entrance are visible at the extreme right. The simple elevations most closely relate to those shown for the Court of King's Bench in SM 53/8/52 and SM 53/8/58. The large arches in the Record Building's façade would have given access to St Stephen's Court, immediately behind the proposed range, on the south side of which stood the Speaker's House. That beneath the Gothic oriel window in the easternmost range relates to the scheme for a 'Watergate' in this location, shown in SM 53/6/12.

Literature

Sawyer, 1999: p 607; footnote 1795

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).