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Soane's office "Journal No1' has an entry for 13 May 1789: 'surveyed Castle'. Presumably he took with him Dove's survey drawings, no doubt originally made for the Norwich City Corporation.
The site plan shows that the area of the 'Castle Hill' was roughly 256 feet by 256 feet and that access was via a bridge to the south and a road to the north-east. Of the three buildings shown, the castle keep had been used as a prison since about 1220 though when purpose-built interventions were made is uncertain. However by 1747-9 Matthew Brettingham (1699-1769) was repairing the keep/prison as well as building the Shire Hall.
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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.
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).