Won in competition soon after his return from six years as a student in Italy. All Hallows was Dance's first executed design and the first strictly Neo-Classical building in Britain. On a tight site and with a tight budget, the church was plainly built of brick with stone-dressings on a single-cell plan with a rectangular nave, apsidal chancel and a slender and elegant west tower, the exterior concealing an interior of subtle distinction. Taken from Dance's Roman studies are elements such as a barrel-vaulted ceiling with cross-vaults above lunette windows and the lozenge coffering of the east end. The most significant (and most discussed) internal detail is the entablature from which architrave and cornice have been subtracted, a 'process of omission' that was to be fully developed in the architecture of Dance's pupil John Soane.

Octagonal planning

In four further designs for churches, two of them unexecuted, Dance uses a Gothic style and an octagonal plan. He also made an unexecuted Classical design for St Martin Outwich in the City of London in 1765-6 that had stretched (non-centralised) octagonal plan. An octagonal plan is but one kind of centralised plant; others include squares, circles, ellipses and Greek Cross plans. D. Findlay has written (1989) about Georgian England's fascination with centralised plans for churches, giving the earliest example of an octagon as Moulton Chapel in Lincolnshire, 1722. Most examples were built after 1750 and Findlay lists four Anglican octagonal churches that precede Dance's first effort in 1789. Of Nonconformist examples there is the Unitarian Octagon Chapel at Norwich, 1756, that, soon after its opening, was visited by John Wesley who subsequently adopted its plan for several of its chapels. The Surrey Chapel, Southwark, 1782-3, built for the preacher the Reverend Rowland Hill (1744-1833), was another octagon and was demolished after bomb damage during World Wall II.

Dance's two executed octagons were, in fact, the insertion of octagonal naves into the medieval churches of St Bartholomew-the-Less in the City of London, 1789-90, and Micheldever church in Hampshire, 1806-08. In neither was any extra space gained, in fact it was reduced in the City church, but a new kind of space and lighting was achieved. Given that a Gothic style for the new work was inevitable, the obvious choice for a centralised planform was an octagon and here, the precedents of English medieval chapter houses or of the octagon at Ely Cathedral suggest themselves. Pevsner's description of the Ely octagon (1954, p.282) is apt: 'It's a delight from beginning to end for anyone who feels for space as strongly as for construction. For the basic emotion created by the octagon as one approaches it along the nave is one of spaciousness, a relief, a deep breath after the oppressive narrowness of the Norman work. Then follows, as one tries to account for that sudden widening of one's lungs, the next moment's feeling, a feeling of surprise. Its immediate cause is that light falls in from large windows diagonally - a deviation unheard of in the church architecture of the West. [And, added in a footnote] I leave out chapter houses and also centrally planned buildings.'

A contemporary description of Dance's St Bartholomew's design as 'Saracenic Gothic' might conjure up an Indian source for the octagonal plan and there are certainly many of these ranging from stepped wells to the Taj Mahal. A less exotic source for St Bartholomew's may have been Wren's church of St Antholin, Budge Row in the City of London. Rebuilt 1678-84 (and demolished in 1874) it had a rectangular site but with a corner missing and Wren's solution was to mark out internally an elongated octagonal area with eight composite columns whose entablatures supported an oval cornice and dome. Thus an awkwardly shaped enclosure was given a symmetrical and centralised body, a lesson that Dance may have applied to the irregular plan of St Bartholomew-the-Less.

There is something perverse about Dance choosing to use a centralised plan in the context of two small existing buildings and it must have been the innate perfection of that type of plan that appealed to him. As Findlay wrote, regarding precedents for central plans in or near Rome (1989, p.74), those who had been on the Grand Tour had visited the circular temples of Vesta at Tivoli and of Matuta in Rome, and had seen the Pantheon ..., the Basilica of St Peter, and the Tempietto of Bramante, to say nothing of the 17th century churches of circular, elliptical, trefoil and even more elaborate shapes designed by such architects as Bernini, Boromini, da Cortona or Rainaldi'. Dance's long residence in Rome would have given him ample time to explore these and other buildings with a centralised plan. Among the sources in his library, the small (internally just over 22 feet wide), octagonal Tower of the Winds published in Stuart and Revett's Antiquities of Athens was another possibility.

Among Dance's other octagonal designs are, for example, an entrance lodge at Camden Place [SM D2/9/6] as well as an octagonal vestibule [SM D2/9/1] and another for an unidentified mausoleum [SM D3/7/17]. Four of his schemes for country houses (three of them unexecuted) have 12-sided halls - Bayham Hall, Norman Court, an unlocated country house for Sir Thomas Baring, and Coleorton.

Dance made two further designs for octagonal churches, neither of them was executed. Alternative designs in a Gothic style for a church at East Stratton, near Stratton Park, are for a free-standing building with a stark exterior. The more developed design has three-sided bays against four of the octagon's walls and a five-sided chancel bay so that there are 12 external angles, each razor-sharp corner emphasised by a slim square 'turret'. The stiffly angular result is emphasised by ashlar coursing and sharply triangular gablets on the turrets and tower; all of which contrast with the smoothly concentric mouldings of the eight arches of the interior. The other unexecuted octagonal church design was identified by Harold Kalman and is an undated scheme for the Guildhall in the Corporation of London Record Office (Surveyor's City Lands Buildings Plans 15). Here, the old chapel was to be converted into a justice room and a smaller new chapel, the plan of which was an octagon within a square with alcoves in the corners, and with a top-lit dome.

Included in this section are some rough studies for churches (and a mausoleum?) with domes and a variety of centralised plans that have not yet been identified.

LITERATURE. N.Pevsner, Cambridgeshire, 1954; Kalman pp.127-54; D Findlay, 'Centralised plans for Anglican churches in Georgian England', Georgian Group Report, 1989, pp.66-74; P.Jeffrey, The City churches of Sir Christopher Wren, 1966, pp.206-08.

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