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Purpose

London: 2 Old Queen Street, Westminster: alterations and additions for Sir James Bland Burges, 1801-2 (1)

Notes

Soane had designed a country house for Sir James Bland Burges - Bellmont, near Faversham, Kent - in 1785, but this was not built. Significant work at his London house on Old Queen Street, near to St James's Park, however, was carried out. Soane's rough survey sketches survive in the archives at Sir John Soane's Museum (SM M Bii/17), as well as one drawing in the drawings collection. Ptolemy Dean notes that 'it was an important part of the negotiations that Soane would undertake to acquire part of St James's Park as a private garden to the house'. The house was extended towards the park with a bay window and balcony which were salvaged and reconstructed in the 1970s. Soane had difficulties in getting Burges to pay up. The balance from a total of £1,119.17.8 was eventually settled after 1814.

Literature:
P. Dean, Sir John Soane and London, 2006, pp. 215-6.

Tom Drysdale, June 2015

Level

Scheme

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.

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Contents of London: 2 Old Queen Street, Westminster: alterations and additions for Sir James Bland Burges, 1801-2 (1)