Church of St Dunstan-in-the-East, City of London, c.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)
  - Church of St Dunstan-in-the-East, City of London, c.1796 (1)

Drawing of church, tower: elevation. SM 47/7/4. ©Sir John Soane's Museum, London. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama

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Reference number

SM 47/7/4

Purpose

Church of St Dunstan-in-the-East, City of London, c.1796

Aspect

Record drawing of the tower and spire. Elevation made to show the height of each of four stages in connection with the design of the Legal Quays and Customs House at the Port of London

Scale

1/12 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

Sub Plinth on Level w^th Monum^t and (Peacock?) dimensions given

Signed and dated

c.1796

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil on laid paper partly stuck down on later wove paper (560x 280, 710 x 540)

Hand

office, Peacock?

Watermark

fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche and AVDL below, backing sheet Smith & Allnutt 1832

Notes

George Bailey (Soane Museum curator 1837-60) listed this drawing in his inventory of the drawings in Dance's plan cabinet of January 1837 and it appears also in Bonomi's inventory of 1862, the point being that it was removed subsequently and filed with Soane's collection.

The vertical dimensions of the Church are each marked and add up to 178 feet 10 inches.

The Customs House, which was in the centre of Dance's grand scheme for the docks, was sited as asymmetrically in front of the Church so that while Wren's lovely Gothic needle-spire (which survived the Blitz) and the stage below it could be seen from the river, most of the two lower stages were hidden. To the west of the Church is Wren's monument, 202 feet high, on the northerly approach to London Bridge.

See also the unexecuted scheme for the Legal quays and Customs House, 1796.

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).