[24] 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)
    - Variant design for a castle-style bridewell scheme, 1791, unexecuted (4)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 33/18

Purpose

[24] Design for the ground floor of a group of prison buildings for Edinburgh Bridewell, 1791, unexecuted

Aspect

Ground plan for a group of prison buildings with surrounding yards enclosed by a retaining wall with bastions. There is a small lodge comprising an entrance hall with a washroom, fumigating room, porter’s room and stairs. There is a pencil addition showing a larger building footprint with a porter’s room and a canteen or laundry. There are walls connecting the lodge to the main prison building which comprises a D-shaped building, divided into radiating cells, with a protruding entrance front. In the centre of the building is a D-shaped inspector's lodge with a series of apertures looking out onto the individual cells, flanked by stairs. Outlined in red and connecting to the outside of the building are flanking links terminating in blocks with bay ends. To the rear of the main building is a small circular inspector’s lodge with apertures to survey each yard

Scale

bar scale of 3/4 of an inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

Plan of the Bridewell at / Edinburgh / (in pencil) Cells / Ironing / Hall / Wash / Fuming G [sic] / Canteen / [_ _ _ _] / Porter / Porter / Cells / Laundry / (verso) Bridewell / (in pencil) 3 / (in pen) Bridewell for Edin^r

Signed and dated

1790-91
1790-91

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured wash including Cerulean blue and pink within a ruled border on laid paper (858x579)

Hand

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

Watermark

Footed P

Literature

Bolton, 1922, p. 11
King, Vol. 2, 2001, p. 54
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

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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