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Working Drawings for alterations and additions to the Offices at Skelton Castle (5)

Notes

The offices were arranged around a roughly triangular court. SM 30/1A/2 is a neat copy of SM 30/1A/1 made to a larger (unstated) scale. Soane's plan (SM 30/1A/1) has the original purpose of some rooms inscribed in a light brown pen and the revised purpose in a darker pen so that, for example, Mr Wharton's room has become the steward's room and the old steward's room has become the room for the housekeeper. It is assumed that this drawing is in the nature of a survey drawing and could have been copied from an existing estate drawing.

SM 30/1A/5 makes plain the areas that Soane was concerned with: the bottom left-hand part of the triangular court (and especially the re-location of the stair and (SM 30/1A/4 and SM 30/1A/3) new partition walls and Water Closets); an area to the left (brewhouse and fuel store in SM 30/1A/1 and SM 30/1A/2); and thirdly an area on the top right-hand side of the court (arched entrance and scullery on SM 30/1A/1 and SM 30/1A/2). These last two areas have a light red wash indicating new work (though without dimensions) and the laundry (top) has new boilers and other fittings.

Ptolemy Dean (op.cit) wrote that Soane's design for re-ordering the domestic offices was 'on a cramped and uneven site with precipitous drops on three sides. The buildings survive virtually untouched and include Soane's rare use of battlements.'

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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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Contents of Working Drawings for alterations and additions to the Offices at Skelton Castle (5)