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Number 1 Robert Street is located on the north-west corner with John Street (now John Adam Street). Numbers 1-3 Robert Street were some of the earliest buildings in London to be built as chambers or tenements, and this is one of the few of Adam’s Adelphi buildings to survive, albeit much altered, and with a dormer storey added in 1908. This house was divided into five chambers and comprised one of the Adelphi lottery prizes. On 9 August 1774 the lease for one of the chamebrs was signed by one John Daniel Haville, with a ground rent of £6.5.0 per annum. The actor William Henry West Betty was resident in one of the chambers in 1835-45; and in 1841-50 the Victorian engraver Henry Ryall was resident.
Level
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 Number 1, corner of Robert Street and John Street
- Design for the ceiling for the back drawing room, 1774, executed at number 2 Robert Street (1)
- Design for a ceiling in the front corner room on the second storey, 1774, as executed (1)