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  • image SM 37/2/4

Reference number

SM 37/2/4

Purpose

[10] Alternative design, December 1792

Aspect

Plan B of kitchen and other buildings including the Gentleman Pensioners, Pastry, Engine Court and Arcade and with a proposed rectangular guard room

Scale

bar scale of 1/8 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, St James's, labelled Chaplain, Bread Pantry, Passage, Lobby, Guard Room, Beds (6 times), Chim:y, Entrance / for the Officers, Serjeants / Room, The Guard Room, 39':0" by 18':10", (Soane) The Kings Kitchen, and some dimensions given. Soane's calculations read: This plan contains / Feet / 39 / 35/ [total] 74 / 16.6/ 16.6 / [total] 33 / 28 / Total 135:0 / Superficial feet / 244:6 / 100 / 100 / 100 /100 / 175 / Total 819.6

Signed and dated

  • John Soane Archt Decr 1792 / Great Scotland Yard

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, blue and light red washes with triple ruled and sepia wash border on laid paper (422 x 547)

Hand

Soane office hand (also drawings [13]-[15], [18]) with some Soane labels and Soane calculations

Watermark

J Buttanshaw, fleur-de-lis above cartouche with bar and below, GR

Notes

While the subsidary spaces remain the same, the guard house is rectangular (39 x 18 feet) in design B and semi-elliptical (40 x 29 feet) in Design A (drawing [9]). There is a considerable contrast between the rather pinched rectangle filled with bed space and with three windows on one side and one on another (design B) and the (almost) horseshoe-shaped alternative (design A) with seven windows, the plan shape emphasised by the bed space layout and with a generous five foot circular skylight. (JL)

Level

Drawing

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

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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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