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Notes
This design of 1780 was produced some 70 years after Matthew Humberstone’s death. As a result of ongoing disputes relating to his estates, a school was not established until 1821. Over the next two centuries the school went through several incarnations and was eventually closed in 2013.
Adam’s design is for a 114ft building, two storeys in height. The school forms the central block and this is flanked by wings containing almshouses. The design is highly practical with separate entrances for the school and each of the almshouses, with individual yards to the rear containing privies. Bolton notes that the layout is typical of Adam for domestic offices.
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 18; D. King, The complete works of Robert and James Adam & unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, pp. 23, 28, 56; A. Nicholls, Almshouses in Early Modern England: Charitable Housing in the Mixed Economy of Welfare 1550-1725, 2019; ‘Matthai Humberstone’, The National archives, Kew, Surrey, Records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Series PROB 11; Class: PROB 11; Piece: 511; ‘Matthew Humberstone Scholl, Clee – 166/722’, www.discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk (accessed February 2021)
Anna McAlaney, 2021
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).