St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, Old Street, Finsbury, Islington, London, 1777, 1781-2 and c.1794-1811

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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)
  - St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, Old Street, Finsbury, Islington, London, 1777, 1781-2 and c.1794-1811 Competition design (by an unidentified architect), preliminary design by James Peacock?, contract drawings, specification and drawings of building as executed (32)

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Reference number

SM D4/1/9, SM D4/1/10, SM D4/1/11

Purpose

St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, Old Street, Finsbury, Islington, London, 1777, 1781-2 and c.1794-1811

Aspect

[12, 13 and 14] Ground floor plans and copies

Scale

1/14 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

dimensions given, ([SM D4/1/11] verso) S^t Luke's Hospital / Plan of Principal Floor and ([SM D4/1/9] and [SM D4/1/11]) Xd ('examined')

Signed and dated

c.1794-1811

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil within single ruled border [SM D4/1/9 and SM D4/1/10] pricked for transfer on wove paper (655 x 995, 630 x 985, 655 x 1010)

Hand

See note to [SM D4/1/16] and [SM D4/1/17]

Watermark

([SM D4/1/9]) 1794 J Whatman, ([SM D4/1/10] 1801

Notes

These drawings correspond to the contract drawing of 1782 ([SM D4/2/2]) except that here the portal on to Old Street and the colonnade linking it to the front door of the Hospital are shown and so are the pavilion wings. These pavilions have rooms lit by large windows in the front and cells towards the rear. The north / south corridor in the pavilion is continuous with the broad east/west corridor of the centre and wings except where divided for the sexes.

They were drawn by two hands ([SM D4 1/9] and [SM D4/1/11] the same) and differ only in that, for example, [SM D4/1/11] is neither ruled nor lettered for cross-sections; rooms are not labelled on any of the floor plans ([SM D4/1/9], [SM D4/1/10], [SM D4/1/11], [SM D4/1/8] and [SM D4/1/7]).

REPRODUCED. 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.

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).