Designs for completing the end of Downing Street, February 1825 (3)

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Office of Works
  - London: Board of Trade and Privy Council Offices, Whitehall & Downing Street: designs for new offices and scheme for the improvement of Downing Street, 1823-33 (284)
    - Designs for the Board of Trade and Privy Council Offices and preliminary designs for the new Home Office, January-September 1825 (60)

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Reference number

SM (131) 49/5/15 (132) 49/5/24 (133) 49/5/16

Purpose

Designs for completing the end of Downing Street, February 1825 (3)

Aspect

131 Perspective Sketch of a Design for completing the New Buildings / in Downing Street and Downing Place from the east end of Downing Street 132 Perspective View of a Design for completing the Buildings in Downing Street from the east end of Downing Street 133 Perspective Sketch of a Design for completing the New Buildings in Downing Street / and Downing Place from the east end of Downing Street

Inscribed

131 as above 132 as above 133 as above

Signed and dated

(131) February 1825 (132) 1825 (133) 14 February 1825

Medium and dimensions

(131) Pen, sepia, black and blue washes, pricked for transfer with single ruled border on wove paper (312 x 490) (132) pen, sepia and blue washes with single ruled and sepia wash border on wove paper (506 x 718) (133) pencil, sepia, black and blue washes on wove paper (361 x 492)

Hand

Soane office

Watermark

(132) Smith & Allnutt 1820

Notes

Soane's suggestions for 'completing' the new Board of Trade and Privy Council Offices involved another new building being erected on the opposite side of Downing Street. This building, shown on the left of drawings 131 and 132, was to mirror the Privy Council Offices but the front on Whitehall is only three bays wide. On drawing 132 the Privy Council Offices continue further into Downing Street with a hexastyle projection at the west end to match that at the east. Soane had the idea to link these two buildings with a triumphal arch at the end of Downing Street (drawing 133). The arch was incorporated into his intended 'processional route' from Hyde Park to the House of Lords but it was never authorised and so remained unbuilt. The date ('14 February 1825') is a little suspicious as the arch does not appear again in any designs until April 1825.

Level

Drawing

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

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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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