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Reference number

SM 73/3/20

Purpose

[4] (recto) Preliminary design, 2 June 1789

Aspect

A Section through the Debtors ^ Rooms & Airing Court; the Men Felon Cells & the ^ Airing Court shewing & the Arcades and details of two types of window

Scale

to an approximate scale of 1/13 inch to one foot

Inscribed

as above, Norwich Castle, Bells from the Ctedral (Cathedral ?) / do ---- in to the / Turnkey's Room and dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • June 2d 1789

Medium and dimensions

Brown pen and warm sepia wash, hatched, on cartridge paper (360 x 511)

Hand

Soane

Notes

The east-west section has Soane's addition of the debtors' wing on the left and his re-modelling of the castle keep for the felons on the right. The felons' courtyard has an arcaded ground floor with three storeys above, all between the walls of the castle that rise 69 feet 6 inches and have a thickness of up to 12 feet 3 inches (the right-hand wall). The alternative window details for the felons' cells offer a segmental-headed window with simple rustication or a semicircular-headed window with more elaborate rustication; both are fitted with iron bars.

The verso of this drawing has a plan, laid-out wall elevations and details for a Drawing Room and on the bottom left-hand side of the cut-down drawing is inscribed Holmes. This is probably the Revd Mr Holmes of Gawdy Hall, Suffolk for whom Soane made alterations in 1789 (see Gawdy Hall, Sufffolk).

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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).