[1] Survey drawing showing the site's original buildings, dated 1790

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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: Buckingham House, 91 Pall Mall: (executed) house for 1st Marquess of Buckingham, 1790-1793, (executed) alterations to the library, 1794, and (executed) alterations on the ground and first floors, 1813 (52)
    - Survey drawings, 1790-after 1792 (3)

attributed to John Sanders (pupil), Pall Mall, Buckingham House: elevation and part-section, 1790. SM 33/1/1. ©Sir John Soane's Museum, London. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama

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Reference number

SM 33/1/1

Purpose

[1] Survey drawing showing the site's original buildings, dated 1790

Aspect

Elevation towards the Street and part-section

Scale

bar scale of 1/8 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

As above, The Marquiss of Buckingham, Pallmall, line of Pavement / of Street, Pavement of area, A, line of Pavement of Street, Floor of Front A 3½ inches higher / than B and dimensions given; (verso, sheet trimmed) Marq^s Buckingham / Elevation of Front to old House / Pall Mall, (pencil) Marq^sBuckingham / Albion Place

Signed and dated

Albion Place March 15 1790

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen and wash on laid paper with three fold marks (521 x 360)

Hand

attributed to John Sanders (1768-1826, pupil 1784-October 1790)

Watermark

fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche and ornate W below

Notes

In 1779, George Nugent Temple Grenville (1753-1813), later first Marquess of Buckingham, inherited Buckingham House from his uncle, Richard Grenville 2nd Earl Temple, in 1779. In 1781 he purchased the adjoining property to the east, where his younger brother, Thomas Grenville (1755-1846), lived for two years. In 1783, the house's lease was renewed by the Crown and the Marquess employed the architect Robert Furze Brettingham (c.1750-1820) to consolidate the two properties into one house. Drawings 2 and 3 show the properties after a set of very light alterations have already been made (probably by Brettingham), with limited communication between the east and west buildings. Most notable is the single front entrance; the east house would have originally had its own front entrance.

The east building is a simple three-bay structure with three rooms on both floors. On both floors, a large room for entertaining fronts the street and two private rooms face the back. A principal staircase and common stair occupy the window-less area at the centre of the plan. Interestingly, the ground floor is shown with a 'school room' and a 'secretary's room'.

The five-bay west building is the London town house inherited by Lord Buckingham. The building is arranged around a central court, with rooms for entertaining added at the back. The house had belonged to Thomas Pitt (1653-1726) from 1710 to 1726 (Survey of London).

Literature

Survey of London, vol.s XXIX and XXX, 1960, p. 360.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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).