[1] Survey of houses adjoining the opera house and Haymarket, 20 September 1790

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / [1] Survey of houses adjoining the opera house and Haymarket, 20 September 1790

Browse

Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Public buildings
  - London: King's Theatre (Opera House): designs for an opera house, c.1790 (9)

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM 61/5/2

Purpose

[1] Survey of houses adjoining the opera house and Haymarket, 20 September 1790

Aspect

A Plan of the Premises in the Haymarket

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

as above, purchased of Mess^rs/ Dayrell by M^rTaylor in June 1790, The back Fronts of Houses in Pall Mall belonging to Mess^rs Dayrell and others, Market lane, The Opera House, Union Court, Union Court Passage, Wennants / the / Watchmaker, Horseshoe ale house, Haymarket and dimensions given

Signed and dated

Copy Sept^r20^th1790

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen and wash on laid paper (478 x 304)

Watermark

J Whatman

Notes

In June 1790 the Darell family assigned their lease of the property to speculator Thomas Holloway, who in turn sub-let the land to the theatre's proprietor William Taylor in August 1790. This acquisition coincided with the rebuilding of the entire theatre, after a fire devastated the structure in 1789. The new theatre was built to a larger size to include this property adjoining its south end. Drawings SM 61/5/9, SM 61/5/7, SM 61/5/8 and SM 61/5/4 show the houses largely intact and converted to private rooms located behind the stage, such as a tea room and a painted room, and including a special entrance for the King (marked KD on 61/5/9) fronting Market Lane.

Literature

Survey of London, St Anne Soho, volume XXXIV, 1966, pp. 455-464.

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).