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  • image SM volume 67/51
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Reference number

SM volume 67/51

Purpose

[2] Survey drawing dated May 1786

Aspect

General Plan of Castle Hill as it now is

Scale

bar scale of 1/16 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, The Right Honble Lord Fortescue, Gothic Gateway, Rock (twice), Malt House, Woodhouse, Chickens (twice), Dressing / Room, Stewards / Office, Chamber, Drawing Room, Butlers / Pantry, Passage, Saloon, Best / Staircase, Smoking Room, Passage, Eating Room, Passage, Servants Hall, Vestibule, Library, Dairy, Larder, Stable (twice), Brewhouse Washouse Laundry &c, Stable (twice), Slaughter House, Hay &c, Wood Yard, Coachouse, Dung Yard, Barns (twice), Stable Yard, Old Coachouse, (pencil, Soane) Road to the Offices, Drying Ground and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • May 1786

Medium and dimensions

Pen and wash, pencil within single ruled border on 2 sheets of laid paper (1156 x 440)

Hand

John McDonnell (1770-?, pupil 1796-1791), John Sanders (1758-?1826, pupil 1784-90) and Soane

Watermark

J Whatman, fleur-de-lis above cartouche with bar and W below

Notes

SM volume 67/51 and SM volume 64/225 are designs for altering the office wings, with the central range of the house left without much detail. The drawings correspond to the elevation in SM 5/3/7, showing Soane's preliminary designs for alterations.

SM volume 67/51 is a measured drawing for making alterations to the west wing and the terminal pavilions. The wood house and malt house occupying the west wing were refitted to contain a kitchen, laundry, housekeeper's room and other servants' rooms. Preliminary designs for these alterations are shown on SM volume 67/51, with windows and a door added to the drawing in pen. A 'Road to Offices' and 'Drying Ground' have been added by Soane in pencil on the left-hand side of the sheet, suggesting a road approaching the house on the west side and entering the 'gothic gateway' to the rear of the house, with a drying ground behind the hedges so as not to be visible from the front entrance. The brew house and washhouse to the north of the central section were demolished.

In comparing SM volume 67/51 and SM volume 64/225 with later plans (SM volume 67/52 and SM volume 64/123), it is apparent that the layout of Lord Fortescue’s rooms was greatly altered, suggesting that another set of building works occurred after the offices were refitted, between 1788 and 1791.

Literature

P. Dean, Sir John Soane and the country estate, 1999, pp. 175

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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).