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  • image SM 37/2/29
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Reference number

SM 37/2/29

Purpose

[6] Record drawing, Law Courts, 6 - 7 April 1824

Aspect

Plan of the main (first) floor of the Law Courts, including the north wall of Westminster Hall, but excluding the southern flanking range of The Stone Building, with the profile of the homogenous scheme for the New Law Courts to St Margaret's Street shown (in red pen)

Scale

bar scale of 1/18 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Plan of the Second Floor / Scale of Feet / A B C D E F G H I K / A Court of Exchequer / B Exchequer Chamber / C. Court of Common Pleas / D Teasurers Remembrancer's Office.- / E. Kings Remembrancers Office / F. Kings Remembrancers Clerks Office / G. Treasurers Remembrancers Office / H. Kings Remembrancers Office / I. Passage to the Court of Exchequer / K. Kings Bench Records.-

Signed and dated

  • 07/04/1824 - 07/04/1824
    dated in accordance with corresponding Day Book entry

Medium and dimensions

Pen, wash, pink wash, pricked for transfer on wove paper (544 x 375)

Hand

Stephen Burchell (1806 - c.1843), draughtsman
The Day Book entries for 6 - 7 April 1824 note that Stephen Burchell was Copying Plans of Buildings / at Westminster.

Notes

This plan is evidently a copy of an existing drawing (whereabouts unknown), prepared before the demolition of the Augmentation Office, which is shown projecting from the north-west corner of the site. However, it does not show the eastern flanking range of The Stone Building, which was used by the House of Commons, rather than the Law Courts. The Judges' Coachouse, located between the central block of The Stone Building and the King's and Treasurer's Remembrancer's Offices, is also absent, suggesting it had been demolished at the time of the original survey (see SM 37/1/17). The perimeter line of the New Law Courts along St Margaret's Street agrees with that indicated in SM 32/7/27. There are minute, amateurish pencil sketches of ornamental details below the bar scale.

Though undated, this drawing appears to be related to the series of copies made from drawings held by the Office of Works in April 1824. It is clearly related to SM 37/2/28, which shows the same plan to the same dimensions, but without the perimeter line and annotations.

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).