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London: House of Commons, Palace of Westminster: unexecuted designs for a new House of Commons, 1825-1833 (29)

Notes

Designs for an entirely new Chamber for the Commons had been submitted by Christopher Wren (1632-1723) in 1698 and by William Kent (1685-1748) in the 1730s.* A reorganisation of H. M. Office of Works in 1814-15, meant that Soane as one of three 'Attached Architects' was responsible for the Palace of Westminster with Edward Crocker as Clerk of Works and Adam Lee** as Labourer in Trust. As with Wren and Kent, Soane's designs (catalogued here) remained unexecuted. The Commons stayed in St Stephen's Chapel until the great fire of 1834 destroyed almost of all of the Palace of Westminster. The new House of Commons by Charles Barry (1795-1860) and A. W. N. Pugin (1812-1852) was opened in 1852.

* There are, in the Soane Museum, designs by Kent, c.1730s together with copies of Kent's designs by the Soane office for the Palace of Westminster including a new House of Commons (SM 36/1/1-13 and 36/2/1-35).

** Drawings by Adam Lee (c.1772-1843) for a new House of Commons also in the Soane Museum Collection (SM 51/4/2-8).


Jill Lever, February 2014

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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.

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).  


Contents of London: House of Commons, Palace of Westminster: unexecuted designs for a new House of Commons, 1825-1833 (29)