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A large wing of domestic offices is introduced on the south side of the house. The arrangement and function of the basement rooms would probably have changed in response to the additional service accomodation in the new wing, but the rooms are not labelled, and the basement appears to have the same layout and dimensions as an earlier plan (drawing 6). The office wing is separate from the main house, with a link to the house at one corner. The offices on the ground floor (drawing 42) consist of three main rooms, one of which (the furthest from the house) contains two large hearths and probably serves as a kitchen. The three rooms are separated and linked, with the links arranged around the top of a staircase at the middle of the wing. The stair descends to the basement level and to a covered passage leading to the kitchen entrance. The parts of the plans in feint wash are retaining walls; in drawing 42 they surround areas open to the basement.
Drawing 43 shows the chamber and attic storeys. The chamber storey has the same layout as the earlier design (drawing 8). The bed chamber at the south-east corner (lower right-hand side of drawing) no longer has a bed, and its doorway into the adjacent dressing room has been blocked. Presumably this fourth bed and door were no longer needed because Mr Sillitoe's accomodation was downstairs. The stairwell has a large lantern on an oval plan.
The attic storey has seven rooms, four with fireplaces and probably serving as bed chambers. Each room has one dormer. An 1851 Census reveals that Purney, Eliza, Frances Mary and Elizabeth Hebblethwaite resided at Pell Wall House with five servants: two footmen, two housemaids and one cook (D. Jenkins, p.19). In his history of Pell Wall, David Jenkins states that the servants' birthplaces suggest that they moved with the family between Pell Wall and the London residence in Bedford Place (op. cit.).
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).
Contents of Presentation drawings, September 1828 (3)
- [41] Presentation drawing, September 1828
- [42] Presentation drawing, September 1828
- [43] Presentation drawing, September 1828