[1] Survey drawing of the House of Commons and adjoining buildings, 1794

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Office of Works
  - London: Palace of Westminster: designs for alterations and additions, 1793-1828 (499)
    - London: House of Commons, Palace of Westminster: unexecuted designs for a new House of Commons, 1825-1833 (29) and executed design for a library and committee rooms, 1825-1830 (53)
      - London: House of Commons, Palace of Westminster: unexecuted designs for a new House of Commons, 1825-1833 (29)

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Reference number

SM (1) 51/6/19

Purpose

[1] Survey drawing of the House of Commons and adjoining buildings, 1794

Aspect

1 Elevation of the east (River Thames) front as modified by Wren and outline plan

Scale

bar scale of 1 and 1/10 inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

The King, labelled: The Clerk of the House of Commons, The House of Commons, The Speaker of the House of Commons and running dimensions given

Signed and dated

Oct^r 7^th 1794

Medium and dimensions

Pen, brown pen, sepia and pink washes, shaded on thin laid paper with one fold mark (538 x 692)

Hand

unidentified - Office of Works 1794

Notes

This survey drawing of 1794 shows the House of Commons in the converted 14th century Chapel of St Stephen that had been its home since 1547. The front with 'Wren's round-arched windows' was altered by Wyatt in 1805-6 and 'given a spurious fourteenth-century finish with Gothic tracery tricked out in brick and stucco' (King's Works, VI, p.526)
Left and right are the houses of the Clerk and the Speaker of the House of Commons and a plan gives the outline of this group of attached but unaligned buildings. A comparison with a plan of Westminster Palace of 1793 (published in Kings Works, VI, fig.19) shows that this survey drawing corresponds except that the Speaker's large house with a three-storey projecting bay is labelled 'Auditor of Exchequer' on the 1793 plan.

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).