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Stables, October 1814 - July 1818 (25)

Notes

Wren’s Stables for Chelsea Hospital were built between 1692 and 1694 and some additions were made in 1698. Soane’s Stables were built between 1814 and 1817, and are around half the size of their predecessor (providing stabling for 36 horses). The conversion of part of Yarborough House into the new Infirmary resulted in the Infirmary itself being hemmed in by surrounding buildings, including the Stable Yard, and thus soon after the Infirmary’s completion Soane constructed new Stables in an alternative location (though still near Wren’s Stables).

Soane’s design for the Stables was for a compact block surrounding a courtyard. As with most of Soane’s Chelsea buildings, yellow stock brick was used and the façade was articulated only by tall blind arcading - conveying an impression of ‘primitive architecture’. The block is one of the most prominent surviving Soane buildings at Chelsea and is now used as office accommodation and workshops.

The SM Archive holds seventeen drawings relating to the Stables - three elevations of chimney stacks with plans, twelve drawings showing various elevations and two drawings showing sections through part of the east side (Priv.Corr.IX.J.4-25).

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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).  


Contents of Stables, October 1814 - July 1818 (25)