[410] Alternative design, Westminster Hall and New Law Courts, c 25 May 1824

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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)
    - New Law Courts - Second Scheme, 1821-29 (345)
      - Northern Range - Court of King's Bench, 1823-29 (207)
        Select Committee Revisions, 1824-29 (79)
        Alternative Number Four: Forward Block, April-June 1824 (27)

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Reference number

SM 53/6/14

Purpose

[410] Alternative design, Westminster Hall and New Law Courts, c 25 May 1824

Aspect

Perpectival plan of Westminster Hall and the Speaker's House, with a plan of the façade of the Court of King's Bench to New Palace Yard. Above, an exterior perspective of Westminster Hall and the New Law Courts with a Palladian façade to the Court of King's Bench, looking south west, unexecuted

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

Cloister / Speaker's House

Signed and dated

c 25/05/1824
dated in accordance with drawing SM 53/8/68

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, coloured washes of pink, sepia and Payne's grey, within single ruled border on wove paper (549 x 431)

Hand

Soane Office, draughtsman

Watermark

Weatherley & Lane / 1818

Notes

This drawing is notable as a demonstration of Soane's Office practice for setting out a perspective view by orthogonal projection. It is also topographically evocative in showing Garden Square, the tower of St Margaret's and Westminster Abbey; a companion piece for SM 53/8/59, which shows a Gothic variant for the exterior of the Court of King's Bench. As shown here, the latter agrees with the variant shown in elevation in SM 53/8/38, with a two-storey linking range connecting with Westminster Hall. As with SM 53/8/59, this drawing proposes to demolish all buildings to the east of Westminster Hall, thereby opening up St Stephen's Court and the Speaker's House (shown on the far left) to New Palace Yard. The latter was created out of the apartments belonging to the Auditor of the Exchequer by James Wyatt in 1793.

There are faint pencil sketch of an applied order and entablatures in the lower right.

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).