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Purpose

Designs for the inn, c1776, as executed (4)

Notes

Adam’s façade for the Red Lion Inn survives, with alterations. The single-bay west wing, however, which was principally to form a china shop and its rooms above, does not survive although it appears to have been executed. The single-bay wing to the east remains, complete with carriage entrance. The current door in the central bay is twentieth century in date and the majority of the first-floor windows are lacking their iron balconies. The design appears to have undergone alterations in execution, with the decorative arch of the first-floor Venetian window omitted, and a tripartite window inserted on the second storey. The design for the hipped roof has been altered, with the addition of a central pediment, and the east end bay at the second storey contains a rectangular window in place of the Diocletian window shown in SM Adam volume 38/59.

A number of surviving decorative niches, eighteenth century in date, may perhaps form part of Adam’s design for the interiors. Harman and Pevsner note that Adam’s stone cantilevered staircase with wrought iron balustrade containing roundels remains in situ, along with a cornice on the first floor landing.

The ballroom with music gallery, shown in SM Adam volume 38/61 has subsequently been divided into a number of rooms. Within one room Harman and Pevsner note the survival of an eighteenth-century chimneypiece, with fluted pilasters, roundels in the capitals and a mantel shelf ornamented with a band of dentils which may have been executed to an Adam design.

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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.

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Contents of Designs for the inn, c1776, as executed (4)