`NOTES ON [SM D4/1/21],` [SM D4/1/22] and [SM D4/1/20]
A typical cell was 10 feet by 6 inches long by 8 feet 2 inches wide with wainscotting to a height of 7 feet 9 inches with rendered walls and barrel-vaulted ceiling above. A six-panel door with a square, barred peephole and an open, barred semicircular-headed window above faced the corridor or gallery and the external wall had a lunette window with shutter.

These neatly made details of the finishing of the cells as executed were drawn to meet the interest shown by architects and others in the design of St Luke's Hospital.

Drawings
The surviving drawings for St Luke's Hospital are all in the Soane Museum. Of the contract drawings for the first phase of building, seven out of 17 together with the specification remain ([SM D4/2/1], [SM D4/2/2], [SM D4/2/3], [SM D4/2/4], [SM D4/2/5], [SM D4/2/6], [SM D4/2/7]). The majority of the drawings ([SM D4/1/9], [SM D4/1/10], [SM D4/1/11], [SM D4/1/8], [SM D4/1/7], [SM D4/1/6], [SM D4/1/5], [SM D4/1/12], [SM D4/1/19], [SM D4/1/14], [SM D4/1/13], [SM D4/1/15], [SM D4/1/18], [SM D4/1/16], [SM D4/1/17], [SM D4/1/24], [SM D4/1/23], [SM D4/1/21], [SM D4/1/22], [SM D4/1/20] were made after the completion of the building in 1789 as a result of the interest shown by architects and asylum commissioners in an up-to-date example of a specialised building type.

There is in the Corporation of London Records Office a site/block plan inscribed 'Plan for widening / Tabernacle Walk / 1787' that is to do with laying part of the hospital's site into the road. However, it shows the layout of the earlier St Luke's Hospital by Dance the Elder and is labelled: 'Apot^y / shop', Wash - / House', 'Sheds', 'Foundary' [sic], 'Dwelling House', 'Womens Wards', Mens Wards', 'Yard' (three times') (CLRO, Comptroller's City Lands Plan 353).

Site
The first St Luke's Hospital, in Moorfields, was designed gratis by the elder George Dance in 1750-51 and maintained by gifts and subscriptions. Evidence for its design rests on engravings (for example, A New and universal History ... of London, 1775 fig.48) that shows a plain, three storey building with, interestingly, lunette windows on the upper floor of the centre block. The hospital, originally intended for 25 patients and later enlarged, became too small, and from 1771 a new site was sought. In 1776, ground on the north side of Old Street in Finsbury known as the Bowling Green (and part of the Peerless Pool Estate) was leased from the Governors of St Bartholomew's Hospital. It consisted of a 550 foot frontage along Old Street and at its deepest was about 350 feet. It was leased in perpetuity at £200 a year, with a fine of £200 every 14 years.

Competition
A building committee was set up by 4 December 1776 and a competition advertised from 22 April 1777. An entry perhaps by James Gandon is among Dance's drawings (See [SM D4/1/3] and [SM D4/1/4]). The winner was indeed Gandon who received the prize of £100 and an unknown architect was awarded the second premium of £50. Other known competitors are: William Newton, whose surviving section at the RIBA (SA 30/2) is inscribed 'N^o8'; James Lewis, who exhibited and later published his design in Original designs in architecture (1796); and John Soane, who submitted two designs. The first, 'N^o3' ([M 13/1/2, 4-6]) was submitted under the motto Mihi turpe relinqui est ('It is shameful for me to be left behind') - the same motto earlier adopted by Dance for his Parma Academy competition entry. Soane's second entry, 'N^o 7' ([SM 13/1/3, 7-10]), had the motto To your decree I bend. Thomas Wetton may have been a competitor since he exhibited a design for a hospital at the Royal Academy in 1778. Gandon and Lewis exhibited designs for a hospital for lunatics in the same year and remarkably, John Alefounder exhibited a design for the same subject but in 1777, two days after the first advertisement appeared. His father was District Surveyor of the parish of St Luke, Old Street, and perhaps gave his son advance notice of the competition.

Commission
None of the eight or more competition designs was commissioned. The Hospital must then have turned to Dance as Surveyor, for the General Committee of St Luke's Hospital received a report from the Building Committee on 4 February 1778 that he had produced a design which was too expensive and had been directed to prepare another to cost about £30,000. In the end, it became necessary to divide the building work into three phases. The first phase of 1782-3 was the building of the carcase but without the entrance and twin pavilions, for a contract sum of £9,150. The fitting out of this first phase followed and in January 1787, 89 curable and 30 incurable patients were transferred from the old Hospital. The third phase for completion followed and when finished in 1789, St Luke's housed 200 acute and 100 incurable patients.

Though it has generally been assumed that Dance, like his father, did not charge a fee, French (1951, p.32) states that he was paid £2,227, which at his usual rate of 5 per cent gives a figure of £44,540 for the total contract sum.

Soane and St Luke's
It must have been bitterly disappointing to Soane that neither of his competition designs was permiated. However, awarded the King's Travelling Studentship, Soane went abroad in March 1778, returning in June 1780. Dance then employed him to work on Newgate Gaol and also to help with the contract drawings for St Luke's ([SM D4/2/1], [SM D4/2/2], [SM D4/2/3], [SM D4/2/4], [SM D4/2/5], [SM D4/2/6], [SM D4/2/7]). These were signed by George Dance in 1781 and by the contractors on 30 May 1782. Apart from the drawings, other evidence for Soane's involvement with St Luke's comes from entries in his Notebook. The first is for 6 July 1781: Lunatic Hospital / No digging - Trenching to [?] / The Wall. Another is for 25 July 1781: Lunatic Hospital Fra^g of both Roofs / Patent Slat^g price & mode of doing it / if no board^g [?] Eaves / Hips & Vallies followed by six pages of data (including three sketches and two details of roof trusses), dimensions and prices of king-post, braces, plates, purlins, rafters and notes including No lead to Hip, Ridges / Lead to Valleys / No Eaves board / Patent Slate £2.12.6 exclusive to carr^ge & Mens travell^g.

A.T Bolton (1924, p.199) discussed these Notebook entries and concluded that Soane's information - dealing with two large trusses of 36 feet and 56 feet span - agrees very well with the dimensions of St Luke's and that 'these are exactly the sort of notes that would be made in working out the drawings' (in particular, [SM D4/2/6] and [SM D4/2/7]).

The question arises as to how much of the design for St Luke's, if any, is owed to Soane. From 1768 to 1772, Soane was in Dance's office and was then an assistant to Henry Holland until 1778 and his departure for Rome. As Surveyor to the Hospital, Dance may have suggested the idea of an open competition (for which he would have been ineligible) to the governors of St Luke's. It was an unusual method, at this time, of finding an architect; Blackfriars Bridge in 1759 was perhaps the only precedent in England. Dance may also have encouraged his protégé to enter for the competition. Soane's adoption of the motto used by Dance for his own prize-winning competition entry for a public gallery for one of his two schemes may be significant. There is a hint of collusion if only because Soane never in any way subsequently revealed his part in the competition.

Soane's first design 'N^o3' has a segmental plan ([SM 13/1/2]) with two stretched quadrant exercise yards that front Old Street and size made secure by a tall screen wall. Design N^o7 has a plan ([SM 13/1/3]) that is three-quarters of a stretched ellipse that, with a shorter screen wall than 'N^o3', encloses the exercise yards also facing Old Street. In the built design, drawn out at least partly by Soane, there was 30 feet of ground, to be planted with trees, between the screen wall, and the face of the Hospital; Newgate Gaol and the Giltspur Street Compter gave directly onto the street with yards at the rear. The elevation of Soane's design 'N^o7' has the two upper storeys of lunettes within a shared blind arch which is found also in Dance and/or James Peacock's Design B ([SM D4/1/1] and [SM D4/1/2]. In the built design, each lunette on the three storeys facing Old Street is set within a separate blind arch. A comparison of Soane's section with Dance's and with Design A suggests that vaulted ceilings and lunettes were required by the competition brief, which has been lost. This brief must have been partly based on the successful elements of the old St Luke's designed by the elder Dance. A comparison of the surviving competition designs suggests that, for example, galleries with cells on one side were required, an arrangement that was first introduced in Robert Hooke's Bethlehem Hospital, Moorfields, 1675-6. The budget largely determined the austere character of the built design in which the top-lighting of the end pavilions built in the final phase is almost the only architectural extravagance. Soane's designs show nothing similar.

Soane used a perspective of the front of St Luke's, drawn by Robert Chantrell in 1813, for his Royal Academy Lecture X ([SM 18/7/12]), commenting that to overcome the monotony of storeys that are placed 'one over the other... a fascia continued along the whole extent of the front' is recommended. In Lecture IV, Soane alludes to St Luke's as a building where the recession and projection of the front 'gives more movement and more effect of light and shadow' (quoted in Watkin, 1996 pp.630, 542).

Influence of St Luke's
As has been said, 19 of the drawings preserved at the Soane Museum were made well after the building was completed. Five of them are ([SM D4/1/24], [SM D4/1/23], [SM D4/1/21], [SM D4/1/22] and [SM D4/1/20]) are joinery details clearly and carefully made in 1794 or after. Unsigned, they have been associated with James Carter, a joiner who worked on many of Dance's buildings and on whom he relied for the technical details of joinery. The details for a lunette window ([SM D4/1/22]), a semicircular-arched sash window ([SM D4/1/24]) and [SM D4/1/23]) and a door ([SM D4/1/21]) are particularly interesting.

John Bevans, A Quaker builder and surveyor of Plaistow, Essex (Colvin), provided designs for The Retreat near York, an asylum established by the Society of Friends under William Tuke. The correspondence (with a few thumbnail sketch details) between Tuke and Bevans (1793-4) is in the archive of The Retreat, kept at the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York (Retreat H/2/1/1). It does not include any copies of the record or 'as built' drawings for St Luke's nor is there any evidence among the correspondence that any were sent. But Bevans' description relates to some of Carter's details and to other aspects of the building and is given here.

Tuke wrote to Bevans in December 1793 asking him to 'look into Luke's Hospital & any / other Building near London constructed for such a pur- / pose & then form a plan according to thy own judgement'. Bevans replied on 12 December 1793 that he 'had been at St Lukes / & have received some hints' on the plan. He wrote with more specific information on 26 February 1794: '... First all the Floors are of yellow Deal to the Galleries and / lodgings Rooms:- and the Governor told me that it would be dangerous to have any other with them, for some times they / strive one with another & are thrown down with violence / & were the Floors of a hard texture like stone the Consequences / would be serious. The Walls of the Lodging Rooms / are lined with deal framing in small pannels & what we / call bead & flush - this is as high as the springing of Arch, the / arch whited. The windows have no glass but a Shutter that is / hung at the Bottom, as per sketch [detail of the lunette shown in [SM D4/1/22]) which when open / fall down on the flank or declivity made in brickwork / when shut up fastens at top with a spring Lock of which the / Keeper has a Key. There is an opening over the Door circular / at top same as Window but comes lower, is therefore larger / than win^w secured with Iron bars & pretty strong Wirework / against ditto. The Doors about 2^Ins thick, beadflush strong made / with spring mortice Locks of which there is a Master Key for Keeper to open / any one. The Bedsteads close, deep sides & end 2½^ins thick / close to & fixt to floor - a close boarded bottom, upon the declivity / towards the feet, with a groove across full of holes, where the / wet drains into a Drawer that's under it for the purpose, which is drawn out when necessary.'

Relating to [SM D4/1/24] and [SM D4/1/23] 'The outside sashes 31^Ins thick of the Bars 2^Ins upon the declivity / as per sketch - the openings or panes 6½ wide & 7½ high / nearly, glazed halfway as I described before*, the half / sash Inch & ½ thick, glazed, & when p the bottom rail comes / against one of the outside, so that very little weather can come / in, nor do I see how it could be raised up or down if / on the outside. In the manner that the large sash is made the / horizontal bars carry of[f] the wet, & are useful in that respect, / at the same time I expect that cast Iron would look neater & be / very secure. There is close wire work with some small Iron / bars across to fasten it to, that reaches up about halfway the / large win^w....'
*Bevans refers here to a letter he wrote on 31 January 1794 about the sash windows: 'all the outside sashes are whole from the top to Bottom of the Squares / so small as not to admit the smallest Person thro' them, the lower / half is glazed & upper not, but there is an inside upper sash glazed / that pulls down so that the air comes in at the upper part of the outside / sash ....'

Relating to [SM D4/1/21]] 'On the Staircase side there is a close door of framing about / 8 feet high against the Iron door &c, which cut off the / View from the stair case upright open bars at top to / secure the opening ...'

Bevans continues with a description and discussion of the water closets, water reservoirs or cisterns and the thickness of the brick walls. Of the blind-arched front he wrote 'The Arches in the front of Wings are introduced for two purposes, firstly / to save Brickwork as the External walls would be too thin without these / additional piers that form these arches, & to fill up the whole solid / is not necessary. The other is, the appertures for the windows in the / Wings being very small, the plain surface of walls would look heavy & / gloomy, which these breaks will measurably take off, and which / ought to be studied in some measure, for ... whether the Elevation is heavy or / light, gloomy or otherwise ...if the outside appears / heavy & Prison-like it has a considerable Effect upon the / Imagination & particularly on those who may have any near / connections in such places...'

Bevans borrowed from the design for the St Luke's sash window which was composed of square panes instead of bars. Though secure, it gave the illusion of ordinary domestic windows. He also borrowed from the lunette design, using both for the Quaker 'retreat for Persons afflicted / with disorders of the Mind' that was a pioneering institution in the humane treatment of the insane. Earlier, in 1791, a John Bevans registered his patent for 'Making circular wooden sash-frames ..., fanlights'.

The international reputation of St Luke's was sealed by Jacques Tenon (1724-1816) who visited the hospital in 1787 and whose Mémoires sur les hôpitaux de Paris, published the following year, stated that Robert Hooke's Bethlem and the younger Dance's St Luke's were the two best-designed mental hospitals known to him. A copy of the book was in Dance's library.

The commissioners for a new hospital for the insane in Copenhagen also sought drawings of St Luke's and in 1803 received as well as 11 sheets of drawings (now lost), many pages of description, a one inch to the foot model of a cell and samples of bedding and restraining devices. Christine Stevenson (2001, p.156) wrote that 'After a prolonged search Dance had failed to find even sketches of the building, and the entire hospital had to be surveyed on the commissioner's behalf.' The drawings taken to Denmark do not (from the surviving 15-page description of them) entirely correspond to [SM D4/1/9], [SM D4/ 1/10], [SM D4/1/11], [SM D4/ 1/8], [SM D4/1/7], [SM D4/1/ 6], [SM D4/1/5], [SM D4/1/12] , [SM D4/1/19], [SM D4/1/14], [SM D4/1/13], [SM D4/1/15], [SM D4/1/18], [SM D4/1/16], [SM D4/1/17]. In some cases different drawings such as a site plan are mentioned and dimensions vary but their purpose must be the same, that is, to provide information for others concerned with building new asylums. A Mr Pepys was paid £5.15.6d as the draughtsman for the Danish set of drawings and this was presumably George Pepys, one of Dance's assistants in the Guildhall office.

Account by Farington
Joseph Farington's servant Molly was admitted to St Luke's and he records a visit to the Hospital in his diary (25 August 1797). 'G. Dance I called on & went with him to St. Luke's Hospital this being a Committee day - I was introduced and was told that the Hospital was now for the first time full - Mr. Dunstan, the Keeper to oblige Dance [a life-long Governor as well as Surveyor], hinted to Dr. Simmons that one place was vacant - on which I was informed that Molly might be brought next Friday for examination ... St. Luke's Hospital cost building &c £40,000, which arose from interest of money belonging to the trust - £20 constitutes a Governor - This excellent institution was set on foot by 3 or 4 private ment, Apothecaries, about 40 years ago. I remarked to Mr. Dunstan that I shd. have thought the unhappy persons mixing together as they do would increase their malady - He said it produced a contrary effect - it caused reflection - and their observing the extravagant & absurd conduct of such as were worse than themselves contributed, by making them cautious, to their cure. We saw many women [sic] at dinner together at a long table - all quiet and orderly - eating off wooden plates with their fingers - no knives or forks are allowed. Mr Dunstan said that on an average 3 out of 4 recover.'

Opinions of the building
A modern opinion of St Luke's is given in Ann Digby's account (1986, pp.37-8) of the much smaller Retreat run by the Society of Friends. 'Those planning the Retreat visited St Luke's on more than one occasion, taking from its design and practical arrangements what they felt was useful, but rejecting what they saw as inhumane. Created [first] in 1751 as a more progressive alternative to Bedlam, [the design of the new] St Luke's still exemplified many traditional assumptions about the animality of the mad. It's absence of heating [in the cells communal 'warming rooms' were provided], lack of warm water, and partially glazed windows indicated that the insane were thought to be immune to cold, and its straw bedding and minimal provision of clothing suggested that they had no need of comfortable surroundings.' Christine Stevenson in her book on hospital and asylum architecture in Britain (2000, p.97, writes that 'As a voluntary hospital, [both the old and new] St Luke's is generally credited with inspiring the foundation of the seven provincial asylums built between 1765 and 1799 ... and the debt probably extended to its [that is, the new St Luke's] planning, as far as that could be followed at smaller institutions. The asylums that began to be built under the terms of the County Asylum Act of 1808 certainly used the range of cells (or later, sometimes, small wards) banked on to a gallery serving as both corridor and day room. In various distributions... this remained the fundamental unit at larger nineteenth-century asylums [until about 1860].'

Later history
St Luke's continued as a hospital until 1916 when it was bought by the Bank of England and adapted by F. W. Troup as a printing works, 1917-20, 1925-7. Damaged by an incendiary bomb in April 1941, it was later demolished and is now the site of St Luke's Estate, a Greater London Council housing estate built from the 1960s.

LITERATURE. W. Rawes, 'A Short history of St Luke's Hospital', The Britannia Quarterly, 1917, pp.25-9, 50-2; A.T. Bolton, 'St Luke's Hospital, Old Street', The Britannia Quarterly, 1924, pp.197-201 (Bank of England staff journal); C. N. French, The Story of St Luke's Hospital, 1951; Stroud pp.141-3, figs 46a, b; Kalman pp.104-10; P. du Prey, John Soane, the making of an architect, 1982, pp.38-54, 338-41; A. Digby, Madness, morality and medicine: a study of the York retreat 1796-1914, Cambridge, 1985; N. Jackson, F. W. Troup Architect 1859-1941, 1985, pp.109-10; D. Stillman, English Neoclassical architecture, vol. II. 1988. pp.400-01, n.67-76: C.Stevenson, Medicine and magnificence, British hospital and asylum architecture 1660-1815, 2000, pp.92-107, passim; C. Stevenson, 'Carsten Anker dines with the younger George Dance, and visits St Luke's Hospital for the Insane'. Architectural History, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, XLIV, 2001, pp.153-61.

OTHER SOURCES. General Court Book of St Luke's Hospital, 1750-1770; General Committee Book of St Luke's Hospital, 1775-1804 (no mention of a competition) from notes made by E.McParland for Dorothy Stroud in Stroud Archive, Soane Museum; Corporation of London Records Office; Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York, information from Dr Katherine Webb, archivist; Dr Christine Stevenson.

Group

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