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  • image SM D3/11/3

Reference number

SM D3/11/3

Purpose

Legal Quays and Custom House, south of Lower Thames Street, City of London, 1796

Aspect

[2] Unfinished elevation of a 9-bay warehouse 171 ft 4 in long

Scale

to a scale (1 1/10 in to 10 ft)

Inscribed

labelled Water of Dock (twice), 174 - 0 betwixt Water & Water of Docks and dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • 1796

Medium and dimensions

Black and brown pen, pencil on laid paper (275 x 520)

Hand

Dance

Verso

Rough perspective of Legal Quays. Pencil, hatching. Dance's rapid drawing emphasises the block-like character of the warehouses that here seem startling modern with their suppressed roofs and piloti-like bases.

Notes

Five storeys, each 8 feet high with floors 2 feet thick, stand over an arcade in which each arch is 11 feet 4 inches wide and the piers 4 feet wide. Pediments are still retained and the design is a more fully worked out version of the warehouses in [SM D3/11/2] with some variations such as the uniform arcade.

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).