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Purpose

Designs for a new library, committee rooms and clerks' offices for the House of Commons, June 1821 (copied June 1825) (7)

Notes

The need for new committee rooms for the Commons was already felt in 1820 - the Surveyor-General, Benjamin Stephenson, proposed using rooms in John Henry Ley's former house on 6 November. The following designs are attributed to Adam Lee (c.1772-1843), Labourer in Trust to the Houses of Parliament and Westminster (1806-32). The proposal is for a three-storey building in between the House of Commons and the Painted Chamber with ground-floor offices, a first-floor library facing towards the River Thames and committee rooms on the two pair floor, built around a quadrangle. A select committee on committee rooms was set up in 1824 and designs were subsequently supplied by Soane (q.v. London: House of Commons, Palace of Westminster: designs and executed design for library and committee rooms, 1825-1830).

Catalogued here are a survey drawing and three designs by Lee, and copies made by the Soane Office.

Tom Drysdale, November 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.

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Contents of Designs for a new library, committee rooms and clerks' offices for the House of Commons, June 1821 (copied June 1825) (7)