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  • image SM 53/3/46
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Reference number

SM 53/3/46

Purpose

[434] Presentation drawing, alternative design, Westminster Hall and New Law Courts, before 18 January 1825

Aspect

Elevation of the linking range between the Court of King's Bench and Westminster Hall, showing the former with three crenelles at its upper level and four at its lower, with the north-west tower of the Hall, as executed

Scale

bar scale of 3/8 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

New Law Courts.- / No. 1. / Tuesday January 18. 1825. / This Drawing was submitted to Sir Charles Long at the Army Pay / Office for his Approbation respecting the Battlements agreeably to the direction of the / Select Committee, / There was also another Drawing No 2. for the same purpose. / Sir Charles having duly considered them both. approved of the / Plan No 1. as best corresponding with the large masses of / the building. / John Soane dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • 17/01/1825
    Jan[uar]y. 1825
    dated in accordance with corresponding Day Books entry

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, wash, pen, pricked for transfer on wove paper (509 x 716)

Hand

Possibly George Bailey (1792 - 1860), draughtsman
The Day Book entry for 17 January 1825 notes that George Bailey was About Drawings of Church & / Courts.

Watermark

Smith & Allnutt / 1820

Notes

The central crenelle and merlons to the linking range are shown as the same size (5ft 61/2in. and 3ft respectively) as those on the adjacent tower of Westminster Hall. An alternative proposal (No. 2.) is given in SM 53/3/47. The latter is clearly in the same hand; the draughtsmanship being prefunctory to the point of crude.

This alternative design appears to have been the form as finally built; it is the same form shown in the model illustrating the final form of the Select Committee's design (see SM SC2).

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).