Scale
(plan) ¼ in to 10 ft and (elevation) 1/6 in to 1 ft
Inscribed
as above, The Heads of the Windows of the Ground Floor Story and all the Parts above / the same in each Mass of Building are to range level throughout. / The Heads of the said Windows are to be not less than 12 feet 5 inches above the / highest part of the Footway before each Mass of Building, labelled (frontage to Tottenham Court Road) This Ground is already let on building Leases and dimensions given
Signed: Office of Works / Guildhall
Dated: 8th Feby 1803
Signed and dated
Medium and dimensions
Pen, sepia, yellow ochre, blue, pink, gamboge, green earth and emerald green washes, shaded, within double ruled and wash border, partly pricked for transfer on wove paper (525 x 720)
Hand
office
Watermark
1794 J Whatman
Notes
The plan shows Alfred Place (which is parallel with Tottenham Coutt Road) with 19 houses on each side of the road, bisected at the north end by Chenies Street with North Crescent beyond with nine lots and by Store Street at the south end with South Crescent beyond, also with nine lots; the lots are washed alternately in bright pink and yellow for clarity and this is found also in a letting plan of Finsbury Square. The elevations of two typical houses, one for Alfred Place and the other for the crescents and slightly wider, show them to be of three storeys above a basement and with a mansard attic; each is three bays wide with a door (painted bright green) in the right-hand bay and tall first floor windows fronted by iron balconies. All are identical, plain and without any accents 'to compete with the geometric clarity of the layout, whose dimensions were ... determined by the theory of harmonic proportion.' Thus, according to Kalman (p.206), on this drawing, the width and height of the houses and the distance between them across the street are on a ratio of 20:40:80 feet (or 21:42:84) and other figures are extrapolated including the length of street and crescent (200:400), pavements widths, widths of end and central houses and depth of plot areas.
A similar plan and elevation are also dated 8 February 1803 (CLRO, Comptroller's City Lands Plan 486) has the names of the lessees inscribed on it, including 'Bernasconi' against five plots. Francis Bernasconi, a plasterer, worked on several of Dance's jobs and sent bills for Ashburnam Place, 1813-14, from Alfred Place, Bedford Square; a bill of 1819 is from 'Bernasconi & Son'.
REPRODUCED. Stroud fig.56c.
Level
Drawing
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
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