Browse
These revisions to the ancillary spaces around the Court of Chancery were made at the behest of the Lord Chancellor, John Singleton Copley, 1st Baron Lyndhurst (in office 2 May 1827-24 November 1830). The Day Book entries for first week of January 1830 record that George Bailey not only prepared plans for this revision but also prepared a report thereon. The additonal documentation may have been prompted by knowledge of a rival scheme by Messrs Skinner & Company; whose fanciful alterations Bailey forwarded to Colonel Stephenson on 7 Jaunary. The report does not survive with these drawings.
As shown in SM 53/2/68 this involved converting the lightwell directly adjacent to the south-west corner of the Court into an additional Robing Room for the Lord Chancellor’s attendants, and rearranging the pair of adjacent waterclosets. It appears that by this date, Soane had wholly delegated such matters to Bailey.
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 Alterations to Court of Chancery, December 1829-January 1830 (2)
- [499] Record drawing, New Law Courts, 31 December 1829
- [500] Record drawing, New Law Courts, 6 January 1830