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Purpose

Old London Bridge and adjacent streets from the City of London to Southwark, 1799 (1). Demonstration drawing

Notes

As Clerk of the City Works, Dance had sometimes to prove to a committee that a well-meant suggestion was impractical. Here, a competition for the proposed rebuilding of London Bridge as part of the Port of London improvements brought with it a request that the roads giving on to it from the north and south banks should be no steeper than the gentle incline of Ludgate Hill. To show a lay committee what were the implications, Dance had a drawing made that demonstrated how long the bridge would need to be; the 10-foot length of the drawing itself would have graphically demonstrated the problem.

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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.

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Contents of Old London Bridge and adjacent streets from the City of London to Southwark, 1799 (1). Demonstration drawing