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London: Lincoln's Inn Fields: unexecuted designs for building within the garden on the east side, 1800 (5)

Notes

Originally open fields, Lincoln's Inn Fields is the largest garden square in London, covering 7¼ acres. Between 1638 and 1659 houses were built and a rudimentary laying out of the Fields was done. However, it became notorious at the end of the century as ill-kept and unsafe: used as a place for executions, for dumping rubbish and was a haunt for robbers and vagabonds. In 1734-5, the residents applied for an Act of Parliament that would allow them to enclose the Fields, appoint a scavenger, a beadle and watchmen, arrange for lighting and for the laying out of the central part of the garden. Twenty one trustees, all inhabitants of the houses around the square were appointed. In due course, Soane after buying and then rebuilding No.12 and subsequently No.13 'Holborn Row' (from 1792) became a trustee.

Literature. S.Palmer,' From Fields to Gardens: the management of Lincoln's Fields in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries', The London Gardener, volume 10, 2004-5, pp.11-28.

Jill Lever January 2016

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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).  


Contents of London: Lincoln's Inn Fields: unexecuted designs for building within the garden on the east side, 1800 (5)