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Stockwood House, Luton, Bedfordshire: unexecuted designs for a house for John Crawley, 1772 (3)

Signed and dated

  • 1772

Notes

John Crawley (1743-1815) was the eldest son of John Crawley MP (1703-67), who had built Stockwood House from 1740, in red brick, to designs by an unknown architect. The younger Crawley succeeded on his father’s death, and commissioned Adam to make designs for a new house in 1772. Although at least two schemes were devised, Adam’s designs are not thought to have been executed. Large-scale alterations were made to the house in 1862, and then it served as a children's hospital between the Second World War and its demolition in 1964. The estate is now used as a public park.

According to Bolton, one of Adam's 1772 drawings for the proposed east front survived at the house at the time of his publication in 1922. The whereabouts of this drawing is now unknown.

I am grateful to Elise Naish, Collections Manager, Wardown Park Museum, for her correspondence regarding Stockwood House.

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, index pp. 29, 67; J. Ingamells, A dictionary of British and Irish travellers in Italy: 1701-1800, 1997, p. 252; History of Parliament online: 'Crawley, John (1703-67), of Stockwood Park, Luton, Beds.'

Frances Sands, 2013

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Scheme

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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Contents of Stockwood House, Luton, Bedfordshire: unexecuted designs for a house for John Crawley, 1772 (3)