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  • image SM 53/1/16

Reference number

SM 53/1/16

Purpose

[146] Revised design, New Law Courts, 1821

Aspect

Plan of the mian (ground) floor of the New Law Courts, incorporating the existing Court of Exchequer and Court of Common Pleas, with the ceilings and lantern openings of the Court of King's Bench, the Vice Chancellor's Court, the Court of Chancery and the Record Room indicated, with the furnishings of Commons Pleas and the Record Room shown, and existing walls to be demolished recorded in line without wash, with revisions in pencil, not executed

Scale

bar scale of 1/10 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Design for the New Courts at Westminster. / Scale of Feet / Westminster Hall. / Entrance into the / Court of Kings Bench / Entrance to the / Court fo Common Pleas / Entrance into the / Vice-Chancellor's Court. / Entrance into the / Court of Chancery. / the Court of Exchequer. / The Court of Equity. / Tribunal. (x 4) / The Chief Baron's / Retiring Room. / Staircase to / the Record / Room. / Ante-Room. / Room for Records. / Lobby. (x 8) / The. Court. of. King's. Bench. / Passage. (x 3) / Attendants / Waiting Room. / Bail Court. / The Court of Common Pleas. / Judge's Retiring Room. / Court of Common Pleas. / Water / Closet. (x 9) / Area. (x 3) / Staircase. (x 3) / Entrance / Hall to the / Court of / King's Bench. / Custos Brevium. / The. Vice-Chancellor's. Court. / The Vice-Chancellor's / Retiring Room / Entrance to the / Court of Common Pleas, and to the / Vice-Chancellor's Court. / Chancery Court. / Attendants on the / Lord Chancellor / the Lord Chancellor's / Retiring Room. / Barrister's Room / Entrance Hall / to the / High Court of / Chancery. / (pencil) Books belonging / to the Court of / Chancery.

Signed and dated

  • 1821
    Lincolns Inn Fields. / 1821

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, wash, with coloured washes of blue, yellow and pink, pen, within quadruple ruled wash border, pricked for tansfer on wove paper (924 x 616)

Hand

Soane Office, draughtsman

Watermark

J Whatman / 1820

Notes

There are noticable revisions to the design in relation to the passage leading from Westminster Hall to the pavilion tower of the flanking range of The Stone Building. An addtional room has been added (in pencil over erasures) into an open area immediately to the west of the Court of King's Bench, though it is not labelled. The Record Room is shown with four banks of shelves or presses (washed in pink) and as ceiled with two groin vaults with a narrow bay of transverse arches in between. The room has also been reduced in length on its southern side. The Court's of King's Bench and the Vice-Chancellor's Court are shown with domes pierced by oculi, whereas the Court of Chancery is hsown with a coved ceiling rising to a square opening for its lantern. The rooms in the southern range of The Stone Building, serving as committee rooms and offices for the House of Commons, are shaded in pink.

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).