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Guardhouse, November 1817 - January 1818 (5)

Notes

Chelsea Hospital already had Wren’s guardhouse, which was situated on the west side of the hospital but in 1817 a new one was required as a new footpath had been laid through Burton’s Court. Presumably a guard was necessary as outsiders would be regularly passing though Hospital property. The guard house’s location, therefore, must have been along the East Road, and presumably opposite Burton’s Court, to the north of the Secretary’s Offices.

Construction began in 1817 and was completed in 1818, at a cost of £729.15.8. The building was very much in the style of Wren (being post 1815), although it does still bear the ‘sculptural’ chimney of Soane’s oeuvre.

Soane’s Guardhouse was destroyed by a bomb in 1945.

The SM Archive holds one elevation of Soane's Guardhouse, with some details in margin and on verso (Priv.Corr.IX.J.31).

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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 Guardhouse, November 1817 - January 1818 (5)