Design for improvements in Westminster

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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: Palace of Westminster: designs for alterations and additions, 1793-1828 (499)
    - Additional drawings, surveys etc. (44)
      - Designs for improvements in Westminster (2)

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Reference number

SM 37/1/18

Purpose

Design for improvements in Westminster

Aspect

Block plan of the area between Great George Street, Princes Street, St Margaret's Church Yard and Garden Square

Scale

bar scale of 1/8 inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

labelled: Design for Improvements in Westminster, King Street, Great George Street, Story's Gate, Queen S^t, built, Mewse (sic), Westminster / National free School, Little George Street, Access to Stabling, Garden Square, Westminster / Sessions House, S^t Margaret's Church Yard, Princes Street, Dartmouth Row, Bennett S^t, Dean S^t

Signed and dated

Nov^r 11^th

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia and burnt Sienna washes, pricked for transfer on wove paper with one fold mark (498 x 345), affixed to SM 37/1/19

Hand

unattributed

Notes

The Westminster Improvements Commission was consolidated from a number of different bodies at the turn of the nineteenth century and, between 1799-1815, spent over £250,000 on the urban renewal of the area around Westminster Hall, Westminster Abbey and St Margaret's Church. In this drawing the area around the Westminster Sessions House is opened up. South is to the top of the sheet.

Tom Drysdale, October 2014

Literature

J. M. Crook and M. H. Port, The History of the King's Works, VI, 1973, pp. 515-6.
S. Sawyer, "Delusions of national grandeur...", Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 13, 2003, pp. 237-50.

Level

Drawing

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).