Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Langside or Aikenhead House, Glasgow: designs for a house and stable offices for Thomas Brown, 1777, as executed (10)

Browse

Purpose

Langside or Aikenhead House, Glasgow: designs for a house and stable offices for Thomas Brown, 1777, as executed (10)

Notes

Thomas Brown (d. 1782) was an Ayrshire-born surgeon who had made his fortune in India before residing in London, and later Glasgow. He was made partner in the Ship Bank in 1775 and in the same year purchased land in Langside from Robert Crawford of Possle to build his own mansion. He married Martha, eldest daughter of George Bogle of Daldowie and had four sons and one daughter. He was succeeded by his eldest son, Dr Thomas Brown, upon his death in 1782.

The Adam office made a series of designs for Langside House, which were incorrectly ascribed to Aikenhead House. Aikenhead was an estate owned by the banker Robert Scott and does not relate to these designs. The confusion might relate to Thomas Brown having resided at Aikenhead House prior to his purchase of land in Langside in 1775.

The Adam office made designs for a house and stable offices which appear to have been constructed, as shown in nineteenth-century maps and photographs. Langside House comprised a simple rectangular villa with bowed ends and a projecting porch which linked to the stable offices via curved or ‘circular’ corridors. The surviving designs also included a series of chimneypieces and friezes but it is not clear if any internal work was carried out by the Adam office. The house was demolished in the mid-twentieth century.

Literature: G. Crawford, History of the Shire of Renfrew, 1818, p. 271; R. Reid, Old Glasgow and Its Environs, 1864, p. 409; A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Volume II, Index, 1922, p. 1; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, Volume 1, 2001, pp. 106, 129

Louisa Catt, 2023

Level

Scheme

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.


Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).  


Contents of Langside or Aikenhead House, Glasgow: designs for a house and stable offices for Thomas Brown, 1777, as executed (10)