[12] Preliminary design for the ground floor of a group of prison buildings for Edinburgh Bridewell, 1791, unexecuted

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Public buildings
  - Bridewell, Edinburgh: designs for a group of prison buildings, 1790-91, executed in part (33)
    - Design for a castle-style bridewell scheme, 1791, unexecuted (11)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 1/271

Purpose

[12] Preliminary design for the ground floor of a group of prison buildings for Edinburgh Bridewell, 1791, unexecuted

Aspect

Sketched ground plan for a group of prison buildings with surrounding yards enclosed by a continuous wall with bastions. At the front of the site is a small lodge with a portico to the front, and a bow to the rear. There are walls connecting the lodge to the main prison building which comprises a D-shaped block, divided into radiating cells, with a deep protruding entrance front and flanking links terminating in large blocks. In the centre of the main building is a circular viewing tower with a series of apertures looking out onto the individual cells, flanked by stairs. The outer blocks comprise a mad house (bedlam) and an infirmary and have segmental-shaped inspection lodges with apertures looking over the cells. To the rear of the main building is a small circular lodge, later designs (SM Adam volume 33/19 & 33/33) show this to be an inspector’s lodge with apertures to survey each yard

Scale

not to scale

Signed and dated

1790-91
datable to 1790-91

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (176x160)

Hand

Possibly
Adam office hand, possibly Robert Morison, John Robertson, or John Paterson

Verso

some calculations and sketch drawing of part of a section of a building, in pencil

Watermark

crowned cartouche [in half]

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.

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