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  • image SM 53/3/51

Reference number

SM 53/3/51

Purpose

[382] Finished drawing, Westminster Hall and New Law Courts, 9 April 1824

Aspect

Plan of Westminster Hall and the main (ground) floor of the New Law Courts, showing a reduction in the footprint to New Palace Yard façade, with the previous façade and offices indicated (in grey), not as executed

Scale

bar scale of 1/10 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Part of the New Courts at Westminster, altered agreeably to the direction of the / Select Committee of the House of Commons. / No. 2. / Scale of Feet / ·WESTMINSTER·HALL· / ·COVRT·OF· / ·COMMON·PLEAS· / ·IUDGES·RETIRING· / ·ROOM· / ·AREA· (x 2) / ·COVRT·OF·KING’S·BENCH· / BAIL COVRT· / ·COVRT·OF·EXCHEQVER· / SKYLIGHT. (x 2) / ·COURT·OF·EQUITY· / (pencil) ATTENDANTS· / ON THE / LORD·CHIEF / BARON· / LORD·CHIEF· / ·BARON· / ·KINGS·REMEMBRANCER. dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • 09/04/1824
    John Soane arch[itect]. / Lincoln's Inn Fields / 9th. April. 1824.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, wash, coloured washes of buff, pink and blue, pen, grey pen, within octupal ruled wash border pricked for transfer on wove paper (587 x 470)

Hand

Soane Office, draughtsman

Notes

This drawing shows the most radically reductivist scheme for accommodating the Select Committee's wishes, which proposed rearranging the disposition of Court rooms within the Law Courts and pushing the northern boundary of the site far behind the north front of Westminster Hall. There is no corresponding elevation for this scheme.

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).