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Purpose
Notes
The sections reveal the bridge infrastructure. Over the arch that spans the water, the ground has been packed with a mixture of gravel and clay. Four hollow cylinders span between the partitions, and the pilasters are also partly hollow, allowing for a lighter structure.
Arthur Bolton, former curator of the Soane Museum (1864-1945, curator 1917-45), writes that the bridge 'is a particularly fine and simple work. The arch of a single span crosses the river with a steep rise, the wing walls, being boldly curving outwards, recall on a small scale the plan of the Triumphal Bridge of 1776' (A. Bolton, p. 19).
Literature
Level
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).
Contents of Working drawing and record copies of the bridge, October 1793 and February 1808 (4)
- [35] Working drawing of the bridge, October 1793
- [36] Record copy of the bridge, 20 February 1808
- [37] Record copy of the bridge, 20 February 1808
- [38] Record copy of the bridge, 22 February 1808