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1776
Adam’s commission for this scheme for alterations to a fifteenth-century coaching inn, the Red Lion in Pontefract, dates from 1776. This happens to coincide with further designs produced for Winn which relate to a number of buildings surrounding the Nostell estate. Adam’s alterations to the Red Lion would include the construction of a new seven-bay façade to South Street, and extensive ballroom with music gallery at first floor, and the addition of a second storey to include further bedrooms. To the west of the main building, with an entrance to South Street, Adam proposed space for a china shop with self-contained rooms above. To the east he constructed a carriage arch, leading through to the courtyard beyond. Further to this Adam’s designs proposed extensions to the rear of the building, alongside the construction of new kitchen offices, a stable block and brew house. The decision to undertake such substantial alterations at the Red Lion Inn was perhaps instigated by Winn’s continued political interest in Pontefract and the surrounding area.
The Red Lion Inn continues in use as the Red Lion Hotel, Pontefract, and the building maintains Adam’s South Street façade, although it is without its single-bay west wing. The interiors have undergone significant alterations; an Adam staircase, a number of eighteenth-century doors and a chimneypiece in the Adam style are the few surviving elements. An additional Adam drawing for the south façade of the inn survives in the National Trust collection at Nostell Priory.
See also: Nostell Priory, Wakefield; 11 St. James's Square, London
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 26, 91; D. King, The complete works of Robert and James Adam & unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume I, pp. 32, 51-52; Nostell Priory and Parkland, National Trust Guide, 2008, pp.54-58; F. Sands, Robert Adam's London, 2016, pp. 130-34; R. Harman and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England, Yorkshire West Riding: Shefield and the South, 2017, p.437; ‘WINN, Sir Rowland, 5th Bt. (1739-85), of Nostell Priory, nr. Pontefract, Yorks.’, www.historyofparliamentonline.org; ‘Red Lion Hotel’, www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk; www.nationaltrust.org.uk/nostell (accessed June 2018)
Anna McAlaney, 2018
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).