Survey drawing and designs (4)

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Town houses
  - London: Adams Place, Borough High Street, Southwark: houses and shops for Francis Adams, August 1781 (4)

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Reference number

SM (1) 39/1/5 (2) 39/1/6 (3) 39/1/4 (4) 39/1/4A

Purpose

Survey drawing and designs (4)

Aspect

1 Survey plan for Francis Adams Esq^re showing two large houses with shop fronts facing Borough High Street with an alley between them running into the cul de sac of Adams Place on the north side of which are three pairs of semi-detached houses with gardens in front and yards in between and with the Falcon public house at the eastern end. On the south side are four pairs of smaller semi-detached houses with yards and no gardens and with the large carpenter's shop of Mr Reynolds at the western end.
2 Alternative Plan N^o 1 and Plan N^o 2 for houses N^o1 to N^o10 on the south side of Adams Place, Elevation of the Houses next the Ground to be let on building leases / forming one side of the Court (which is the Elevation of Plan No 1) and Elevation next the Borough [High Street] of a three-bay, three-storey, pedimented house with shopfronts, feint pencil section
3 Front Elevation next the Borough High Street for Francis Adams Esq^re of house of three storeys and attic and 7 feet high basement with shops on ground floor
4 Rough survey plan (in feint pencil) of part of the site with a feint pencil note Shed with / Workshop / over M^r J---- [illegible] house and some dimensions given, (verso, pen) M^r Adams/ Adams Place Boro' / 1781

Scale

(1) bar scale of 1/15 in to 1 ft (2) bar scale of 1/9 in to 1 ft (elevation of house and shop), bar scale of 1/11 in to 1 ft (elevation of south side houses and of plans) (3) 1/4 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

(1) as above, Garden (six times), Yard or Yd (17 times), Kitchen (the public house), Sewer (twice) numbered on south side N^o1 to N^o8 and on the north side N^o 9 to N^o14 and north point labelled NSEW, dimensions of frontages on south side given and some rough pencil dimensions added (verso) M^rAdams / a Plan of Adams Place
(2) as above, Francis Adams Esq., The Borough High Street, N^o 1 to N^o 10, Ground to be let on Building Leases, Passage to Court, Court or Court Yard (18 times), Privy (8 times), This part of the Premises left for / further consideration, (on shopfront - BOCHA TEA DEALER, ADAMS PLACE, IRISH LINEN DRAPER, some dimensions given (verso) M^rAdams / a Plan of one side of Adams / Place with Elevations for d^o
(3) as above, Middle of old Party Wall (twice), Level of / foot way, The Windows as / near the bot- / tom of the Plate / as Possible and running dimensions given so that, for example, the building is 34 ft 11 ins wide, 43 feet up to an inclduing the bucranium and festoo frieze
(4) as above

Signed and dated

(2) Aug^st21^st1781

Medium and dimensions

(1) Pen, light and medium pink washes, pencil, pricked for transfer on laid paper with three fold marks within single wide-ruled border (430 x 543) (2) pen, cream, sepia, pink and burnt sienna washes, pencil on laid paper with old, paper repairs, three fold marks (493 x 710) (3) pen on coarse laid paper with two fold marks (488 x 307) (4) pencil on wove paper (219 x 324)

Hand

(1) not Soane - a surveyor ? (2) ? Robert Baldwin (fl.1762-c.1804) (3) the unidentified hand appears also on some of Dance's drawings for the City of London ? (4) Soane

Watermark

(1) Taylor, fleur-de-lis above cartouche with bar and below, GR (2) J Whatman, fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche and below, ornate W

Notes

The drawings catalogued here were preceded by a design made in one of Soane's sketchbooks that consists of a plan, elevation and perspective for a shallow-bowed shop front (see Sketchbooks catalogue): 'Miscellaneous Sketches', 1780-2, SM volume 40, p.11 recto)
There are copies (made by John Sanders, a Soane pupil from 1 September 1784 to 1790) of two letters from Soane to Francis Adams, sent on 25 February and 30 March 1784 in 'Precedents in Architecture 1784' , 17 recto & verso,18 recto, volume 41. These are concerned with rents and accounts.
Related manuscript material in Soane's Notebooks, Account Book 1781-6, Abstract of Bills 1782 and Journal 1781-1797.
For a full discussion of the design and construction of Adams Place see du Prey, op.cit.

Jill Lever, November 2008

The front elevation, seen in drawing 3, shows a cornice of bucrania and swags which are presumably Coade stone. Adam's Place is Soane's earliest known use of Coade stone (Alison Kelly, Mrs Coade’s Stone (1990) p85).
With thanks to Caroline Stanford, Historian, Landmark History, for this information, 2023.

Literature

P. du Prey, John Soane: the making of an architect, 1982, pp.219-232; D. Stroud, Sir John Soane architect, 2nd ed. 1996, pp.51, 53, 240

Level

Drawing

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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.

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