Preliminary designs for new Board of Trade Offices, 1823 (2)

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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: Board of Trade and Privy Council Offices, Whitehall & Downing Street: designs for new offices and scheme for the improvement of Downing Street, 1823-33 (284)
    - Designs and working drawings for the new Board of Trade and Privy Council Offices, December 1823-October 1824 (106)

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Reference number

SM (18) 49/3/1 (19) 49/3/2

Purpose

Preliminary designs for new Board of Trade Offices, 1823 (2)

Aspect

18 Perspective Sketch of a Design for the New Board of Trade Offices &c at Whitehall 19 Perspective Sketch of a Design for the New Buildings for the Board of Trade &c at Whitehall

Inscribed

18 as above 19 as above

Signed and dated

(18, 19) 1823

Medium and dimensions

(18, 19) Pencil, sepia, black and blue washes with single ruled border on laid paper (287 x 441, 288 x 438)

Hand

Soane office

Watermark

(18, 19) fleur-de-lis above cartouche with bar and below, ornate CA

Notes

In the autumn of 1823 it was decided to rebuild the Privy Council Offices, which had been declared unsafe and vacated in 1811, as well as the offices of the Board of Trade. The old Privy Council Offices adjoined the Board of Trade to the south. Soane's initial designs bear an uncanny resemblance to the New Bank Buildings which were completed in 1810 (q.v. Bank of England: London: New Bank Buildings, Princes Street, City of London, 1807-10). The building has 15 bays and three storeys with a basement and round-headed windows. The two end bays project and have Ionic columns and the centre of the frontage has eight panel pilasters on the upper two storeys.

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.

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