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  • image SM 73/3/17
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Reference number

SM 73/3/17

Purpose

[46] Working drawing for the accommodation of the male felons within the Keep, May 1792

Aspect

Plan of the 3d Floor above the Arcades

Scale

bar scale of 1/5 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, AAAA to be in the Center of the / outside of Piers, Ventilation (3 times), Stone Paving (3 times), and dimensions given. Norwich Castle

Signed and dated

  • May 9th 1792

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, pale blue and very pale pink washes (530 x 655) on thin cartridge paper

Hand

Frederick Meyer (1775-?, pupil 1791-96) and Thomas Chawner (1774-1851, pupil 1788-94) see Notes below

Notes

Soane's office 'Journal No1' records on 11 May 1792: 'sent per Mail 7 Workg drawgs / of Plan & Sections of Men Felons / Gaol'. The seven drawings included plans for four floors, latitudinal and longitudinal sections, plan and section of roof, and drawing of an iron stay under the galleries. On 9 June, Soane took to Norwich, eight working drawings plus a section of window and gallery. Checked against comparable drawings within the set SM 73/3/7, SM 73/3/6, SM 73/3/8, SM 73/3/29, SM 73/3/30, SM 73/3/32 and SM 73/3/31, made three years earlier, there are few changes but greater detail.

The drawing catalogued here is dated May 9 1792. However, Soane's office 'Day Book' for 1792 shows that working drawings for Norwich Castle were being made on fourteen days in May 1792, on seven of these days by Meyer and on the others by both Meyer and Chawner. On 19 May a new pupil Thomas Jeans (pupil, 1792-97) was 'shadowing plans', that is, adding coloured washes?. The drawing was presumably made to send out for tender and thus copies were required.

In 1792, there were ten people working in the office. Of these, four were pupils (Chawner, Laing, Meyer and Jeans), two were assistants (Lodder, Ebdon) and four were clerks. Presumably the clerks, among other things, wrote out the specifications and tender documents. Christopher Ebdon (1744-1824) was an architect, experiencing a thin time with his own practice who worked for Soane between 1789-1792.

The drawing relates to construction work within the Norman walls of the Keep. After the removal of internal walls and partitions, Soane built a virtually free-standing structure with a basement, ground floor courtyard and arcade, and three floors over, all underneath the open top of the 90 x 95 feet Keep.

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).