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Purpose
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Inscribed
Signed and dated
- 1807
Medium and dimensions
Hand
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Notes
Either side of the Keeper's House are, to the left, a wash-house and kitchen with yard and privy on either side, and to the right the 'strong room' with a yard on three sides; a separate room and yard near the front for uncommitted prisoners was advocated by John Howard, the prison reformer. At the back are the 12 cells for the felons on three floors fronted by arcades with an exercise yard and two privies. On either side of the centre are the male and female debtors' quarters with sleeping rooms, day rooms and large exercise yards with privies. The total enclosure is 141 by 92 feet.
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).