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  • image Image 1 for SM D1/10/25
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  • image Image 1 for SM D1/10/25
  • image Image 2 for SM D1/10/25

Reference number

SM D1/10/25

Purpose

Coleorton, Leicestershire, 1802-08

Aspect

[45] Ground floor plan with warm-air system

Scale

¼ in to 1 ft

Inscribed

labelled A-H, Hot Air (three times), Hot air flue, Smoak flue, Outlet (six times) and (pencil, Dance) Mr Justice Abbott [sic] and (verso, Dance) Plan of Coleorton Hall / and proposed methods of /warming it

Signed and dated

  • 1802-08

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pink, sepia, light red, blue and yellow washes, pencil on wove paper (490 x 605)

Hand

heating engineer

Watermark

E&P 1801

Notes

The key to A-H is missing; however, A is the square device (furnace?) in the centre; B the flange-connected pipes; C the hot-air flue running east from the centre; D the hot-air flue running southwest from the centre; E the T-shaped hot-air flue running west from the centre; there is no G; H is a water tank on the north side. The tank and pipe run are washed in blue.

It seems that Dance called in a specialist for the design of the heating system for Coleorton. The plan, corresponding to [SM D1/10/23] (record ground floor plan), has carefully drawn technical details showing pipe runs, hot-air flues, smoke flues, outlets and heating apparatus. The hot-air ducts are concentrated within the Polygon Hall and entrance hall and the pipes run around the perimeter of the building. There is plentiful existing evidence of the warm-air heating system proposed by Dance and shown on [SM D1/13/16] and [SM D1/13/17] (Polygon Hall) - brass ventilators, stone floor slabs (with inset handles) that when removed reveal a smaller stone slab concealing a duct and, below the Polygon Hall in the basement, more ducts, the site of the furnace and a coal chute; the ventilator in the garden also still exists (cf.[SM D1/14/5] verso). But there seems to be nothing to show that the design catalogued above was carried out.

Farington recorded in his diary (21 March 1820) 'Sir George Beaumont called. Spoke much of what had been successfully done to give warmth to Coleorton Hall'. This comment was made 12 years after the Beaumonts moved into the house and implies that improved heating methods were needed.

Dance's faint pencil note 'Mr Justice Abbott' refers to Charles Abbot (1757-1829) later Lord Colchester, Speaker of the House of Commons. Dance made additions to Kidbrooke Park in Sussex, 1815 (Colvin).

Level

Drawing

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

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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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