[9] Design for St John’s, Bethnal Green, London, 30 May [18]25

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Churches and chapels
  - London: Church of St John on Bethnal Green, London 1824-28 (66)
    - Designs for perspectives, St John's, Bethnal Green, London, May-June 1825 [2]

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Reference number

SM 47/5/62

Purpose

[9] Design for St John’s, Bethnal Green, London, 30 May [18]25

Aspect

Elevation of the church of five-by-nine bays, and identical in nearly all aspects to SM 47/5/60, but all the Soane caps along the roofline and base of the tower have been removed

Scale

to a scale

Signed and dated

30 May [18]25
30/5/25 this is an extremely unusual dating formula for a Soane drawing and may have been added by a much later hand

Medium and dimensions

Pen, wash, coloured washes of blue, brown, olive green, Payne’s Grey, yellow and violet on wove paper (542 x 370)

Hand

Probably Burchell, S., draughtsman
The Soane Office Day Book for 30 May 1825 records both Burchell and Davis working on designs for St John's, Bethnal Green
Probably Edward Davis (1802 - 1852), draughtsman
The Soane Office Day Book for 30 May 1825 records both Burchell and Davis working on designs for St John's, Bethnal Green

Notes

The date does cause a problem. Here, with all the Soane caps removed one would expect this to be later as most issues with this church was about removing unecessary ornament, not suddenly increasing the amount. The only way around this if indeed SM 47/5/60 dates to June 1824, but there is no record in the Soane Office Day Books for any work on St John's during that month (or indeed year). Nonetheless, they are sequenced in this way as it makes more historical and architectural sense given what is known about the project.

Literature

Carr, 1976 Vol. II, p. 428; Vol. III, p. 887 fig. 261

Level

Drawing

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.

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