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

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George Dance office drawings: the drawings of George Dance the Elder and George Dance the Younger
- Town Planning and London Bridge (8)
  - Legal Quays and Custom House, south of Lower Thames Street, City of London, 1796. Preliminary designs and designs, all unexecuted (5)

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Reference number

SM D3/11/5

Purpose

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

Aspect

[4] Elevation and also showing A the Monument, tower of B St Dunstans in the East and C London Bridge

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

as above, Sketch of a Design for the improvement of the Legal Quays between London Bridge & The Tower and dimensions given Signed: Geo: Dance Architect Dated: 1796

Signed and dated

1796

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, raw umber, burnt umber and green earth washes, watercolour technique, shaded within triple ruled border on wove paper laid down on card (220 x 1055 on 265 x 1100)

Hand

Dance

Notes

Drawn by Dance in a finished manner with staffage including two sailing barges and a rowing boat, the drawing was engraved: see Engraved plans referred to in the Second and Third Reports of the Parliamentary Select Committee upon the Improvement of the Port of London, published 1799 and 1800. Plate XVIII.

The length of the building is 1516 feet 6 inches and it is supported on 67 arches. The final design is more highly modelled than in the preliminary designs with the arched podium broken forward to provide loading ramps that are also a setting for statues representing Europe, Asia, Africa and America. The crowning features are Britannia with shield and spear and, above the balustrade in the centre and at each end, twin S-scrolls with a scallop shell in the centre, a decorative motif that Soane was later to use in the attic of the Bank of England; there is a specimen on the north wall of the Monument Court, at the Soane Museum. Though the five-storey warehouses are present in all of the designs catalogued above, in this design their fronts are recessed as well as advanced and the water-gates are emphasised by mouldings so at to articulate the long front. The four or five windows in each bay are divided only by sills and share the same arched head, here semicircular and in [SM D3/11/4], segmental. The 67 semicircular-headed arches of the podium are raised on taller piers in this final design and the shallow-hipped roof of [SM D3/11/4] is suppressed behind a parapet.

See also a record drawing of St Dunstan-in-the-East showing the height of each stage made in connection with the design of the Legal Quays.

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).