Newgate Gaol, Newgate Street, City of London, 1768-c.1813

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George Dance office drawings: the drawings of George Dance the Elder and George Dance the Younger
- Prison, courts and a lunatic hospital (5)
  - Newgate Gaol, Newgate Street, City of London, 1768-c.1813 (25)

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Reference number

SM D4/4/9

Purpose

Newgate Gaol, Newgate Street, City of London, 1768-c.1813

Aspect

[10] Elevation of principal (W) front

Scale

1/6 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

Exhibited to me June 9 1769 / Geo: Wyatt / Exhibited to me June 16 1769 / John Devall Jun^r / Exhibited to us June 16th 1769 / JN^o Read / Joshua Hobson Dated: June 9 1769 and June 16 1769 (as above)

Signed and dated

1768-c.1813

Medium and dimensions

Pen and sepia washes, shaded, within double ruled and wash border on laid paper, two sheets joined, worn, recently lined and filled (555 x 1585)

Hand

Baldwin

Notes

Robert Baldwin's rendering emphasises the grimly rusticated character of the facade. A drawing for the west elevation by Baldwin that correctly reverses the shading (see note to [SM D4/4/23]) is in the Corporation of London Records Office (Surveyor's Justice Plans, vol.1, No.9).

Dance has revised the simple slab-like forms of his earlier design ([SM D4/4/1]) so that the Keeper's House is now pedimented and the flanking entrance lodges have an extra hipped storey while the formerly unarticulated wings are now slightly advanced at the corners and modelled by giant blind aedicules within semicircular-headed blind recesses. The claustrophobic horror of these massive, windowless walls is matched by the twin entrances that have pierced doors above which hang shackles below meshed lunette windows; all serving to emphasise the caged terror of imprisonment.

REPRODUCED. J. Summerson, 'Newgate Gaol: catalogue of drawings in Sir John Soane's Museum', Architectural History, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, II, 1959, p.46 (in part); Stroud fig.29b (part of the west elevation); H.D. Kalman, 'Newgate Prison', Architectural History, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, XII, 1969, fig.29c.

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.

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).