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  • image SM 37/3/19

Reference number

SM 37/3/19

Purpose

[36] Survey, Court of Common Pleas, c 1820-23

Aspect

Plan of the main floor of the Court of Commons Pleas, with adjacent corridor and furnishings, and elevation of the tribunal and west wall, with section through the Court Room and adjacent Judges Robing Room and Record Room

Scale

bar scale of 1/12 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Hall floor / Record Room / Judges Room / Westminster / Hall / Court of Common Pleas / Tribune / Closet / The Judges / Robing Room / The Kings / Coat of Arms dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • c 1820-23
    dated in accordance with known building campaign

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, wash, coloured washes of raw umber, burnt sienna, pink and green, pen, on laid paper (485 x 300)

Hand

Attributed to John William Hiort (1772 - 1861), draughtsman
attributed in accordance with SM 37/3/14

Watermark

William Weatherley

Notes

This is a similar survey to SM 37/3/20, but drawn to a smaller scale and by an accomplished hand. Such surveys appear to relate to the earliest planning of the New Law Courts, where Soane intended to incorporate the existing Court of Common Pleas and its offices, initially as it existed and subsequently with substantial alterations.

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).