Wesley's House at 47 City Road is now the only surviving house in London designed by Dance. It is not represented by drawings at the Soane Museum though there are several at the Corporation of London Record Office (including Surveyor's City Land Plans 1165 for five terrace houses; Comptroller's Land Plans 466 for five terrace houses, dated 1779; Surveyor's Miscellaneous Plans 165A for a glazed cupboard, 284 for a guilloche moulding). Very different from the aristocratic town houses of Mayfair and St James's, it was lived in by John Wesley from 1779 until his death in 1791. Though since repaired and restored several times it retains much of the 'perfectly neat, but not fine' plan and details that Dance gave it including such space-saving devices as built-in, glazed cupboards and vertical window shutters.

Of the six schemes for London houses catalogued here, virtually nothing has survived. The house for George Dance's older brother Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland in Piccadilly, re-clad inside and outside around 1900, was demolished for the Park Lane dual carriageway in the early 1970s. Sir Francis Baring's house at 33 Hill Street, Mayfair remodelled by Dance was replaced in the late 19th century. Additions to 22 Arlington Street for Lord Eardley have not survived though the house is still there, as is 10 St James's Square where Dance designed decoration and library fittings for T. F. Heathcote that, if carried out, no longer exist. The library designed for the Marquess of Lansdowne's house in Berkeley Square was greatly altered in 1818. The striking designs for the rebuilding of 6 St James's Square for the 5th Earl of Bristol were not executed.

The alterations and additions at Hill Street and the design for 143 Piccadilly were thoughtfully done but conservative. However, the variant elevations (all that seems to have been drawn) for 6 St James's Square are in an almost brutally rationalist spirit that occasionally revealed itself as in, for example, the external form of the nave of Micheldever Church and show Dance maintaining intensity in old age. The composition of an elevation with a solid centre devoid of windows or door ([SM D3/7/9], [SM D3/7/11], [SM D3/7/13]) is unconventional while the use of a giant arcade with pilasters and with the semicircular arches containing Diocletian windows ([SM D3/7/12], [SM D3/7/13]) recall the wall treatment of Dance's first building - All Hallows Church.

The lost dining room with its chimney-piece at Arlington Street and the decorations at 10 St James's Square were interior design schemes as was the library at Lansdowne House which, with its form, system of indirect lighting, Pompeian decoration and Egyptian chimney-piece must have been one of the most beautiful and innovative London interiors of its time. And it is possible to compare Dance's scheme with the original one by Robert Adam as well as those by Panini, Clérisseau and Bélanger, all in the Soane Museum.

LITERATURE. Revd L. G. Farmer, 'The Architect of Wesley's Chapel', typescript, 1984 (in Corporation of London Record Office Library).

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