Survey drawing of the Old Tennis Court containing the offices of the Secretary of State for the Home Department, 1824

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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 (50) 49/5/8

Purpose

Survey drawing of the Old Tennis Court containing the offices of the Secretary of State for the Home Department, 1824

Aspect

50 Elevation of Front of the Offices of the Secretary of State for the Home Department at Whitehall; (verso) plan of the site showing the excavated ground

Scale

bar scale of 1/3 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, labelled: Passage, Old Wall, Defaced Stone (4 times), Section of Tower or Turrets, Face of Wall, Hight (sic) of Window (twice) and dimensions given, the rest illegible; (verso, pencil): The Excavated / Ground is 7.9 / below the Str[eet] / Paving, White Hall, Excavated Ground (twice), This ?Shore is 3 feet above the Foundation, Downing Street, Council Offices, Treasury Passage, This Shore is 1.3 above the / Excavated Gr[ound]

Signed and dated

1824

Medium and dimensions

Pen, light red and grey washes, (verso) pencil, partly pricked for transfer on wove paper (722 x 534)

Hand

?clerk of works

Notes

Drawing 50 shows the left hand side of the frontage to the Home Office - formerly the Old Tennis Court - with a section through one of the corner turrets. It was later decided to include new offices for the Home Department in the new building but the Tudor frontage was retained until Charles Barry's remodelling of Soane's building in 1846. The verso of the drawing corresponds to drawings 45-49 and shows the ground excavated on the site.

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.

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).