Designs for new Board of Trade Offices, December 1823 (6)

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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 (20) 49/5/4 (21) 50/1/5 (22) 49/3/21 (23) 49/3/22 (24) 49/3/23 (25) 49/3/24

Purpose

Designs for new Board of Trade Offices, December 1823 (6)

Aspect

20 Site plan with plans of two designs for the frontage overlaid 21 Site plan with plans of two designs for the frontage overlaid 22-25 Front elevations

Scale

(20-25) bar scales of 1/20 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

20 labelled: Design N^o 1, Design N^o 2, King Street, Original line, Altered line, Downing Street, Gothic Entrance to the Treasury, Melbourne House, Treasury, The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Office 21 labelled: Whitehall, King Street, Downing Street, 32.6, 7.6, Gothic Entrance to the Treasury, Melbourne House, Treasury, The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Office 22 Design N^o 2 A 23 Design N^o 2 B 24 Design N^o 2 C

Signed and dated

(20) 2^nd Dec^r 1823 (21) 2^nd Dec^r / 1823 (22, 24, 25) 9^th December 1823 (23) 9^th Dec^r 1823

Medium and dimensions

(20) Pen, grey and pink washes with quadruple ruled, grey and black wash border on wove paper (536 x 740) (21) pen, grey and pink washes, pricked for transfer on wove paper, with Office of Works stamp on verso (554 x 650) (22-25) pen, black, burnt umber and olive green washes with seven ruled, black and grey wash border on wove paper (370 x 470, 367 x 470, 370 x 473, 367 x 470)

Hand

(20-25) Charles Edward Papendiek (1801-35, pupil 1818-24)

Watermark

(23) J Whatman 1822 (24) Weatherley & Lane 1818 (25) Wea[therley & Lane]

Notes

On each of Soane's initial designs for the new Board of Trade and Privy Council Offices the frontage is approximately 200 feet wide. The four designs (drawings 22-25) have other similarities: the new building has 15 bays and two storeys with a basement, the ground floor has banded rustication, the columns are Ionic and the height of the building is determined by the Old Tennis Courts in all four designs. On drawings 22 and 23, Soane adds a new turret to the south side of the entrance to the Treasury passage matching the corner turret of the Old Tennis Court.
The elevation designs correspond with the plans (drawings 20 and 21) so that drawing 20 shows 'Design No 1' (drawing 19) and 'Design No 2 A' and drawing 21 shows 'Design No 2 C' and the design on drawing 25.
On drawing 20, two dotted lines show the 'original line' and the 'altered line' of the front of the building. Soane's original line would have cut into King Street. Lord Harrowby objected to this and directed the line to be set back so that King Street would not be affected. This was to cause difficulties later, however, when it was decided to rebuild the Home Office in March 1825.

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).