[22] Survey, Westminster Hall, c 1823

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Office of Works
  - London: Palace of Westminster: The New Law Courts, surveys and designs, 1820-32 (507)
    - Survey Drawings - Previously Extant Buildings, 1820-23 (122)
      - Courts & Offices Surveys (110)
        Westminster Hall, 1822-26 (24)

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Reference number

SM 53/7/1

Purpose

[22] Survey, Westminster Hall, c 1823

Aspect

Plan of the south end of Westminster Hall, showing the arrangements of stairway passages and ancillary rooms

Scale

bar scale of ¹/₄ inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Passage Leading to Cotton Garden / Passage Leading to the House of / Commons - / Ushers Room. / Counsels Robing Room. / Westminster Hall / (pencil) The Celar / A (x 2) / Ushers (verso, pencil) New Court / Design for the Court of / Kings Bench / [Mars Seeteen?]

Signed and dated

c 1823
dated in accordance with known building campaign

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, wash, pen, pricked for transfer on wove paper (459 x 358)

Hand

Soane Office, draughtsman

Notes

The diagonal outer wall of the Ushers Room has been erased and redrawn in a different location. The plan records the ancillary spaces behind the south wall of Westminster Hall, which were used by the Courts of King's Bench and Chancery during legal sessions. Curatorial annotations date the sheets in this set to 1823 (SM 53/7/1 - 3), which is plausible given the pevalence of entries for work on the New Law Courts that year. The Ushers Room was later demolished and the remaining space opened to form the Outer Lobby for the House of Commons (see SM 53/1/28).

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation. This catalogue of Soane’s designs for the New Law Courts was generously funded by The Worshipful Company of Mercers and The Pilgrim Trust.

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).