Design for the new government buildings and alterations to the Palace of Westminster, April 1828

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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 for the new government buildings on Whitehall and the completion of Downing Street with a Triumphal Arch, December 1825-May 1833 (100)

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Reference number

SM (271) 49/5/39

Purpose

Design for the new government buildings and alterations to the Palace of Westminster, April 1828

Aspect

271 General plan of Westminster with elevation of the new government buildings

Scale

bar scale of 1/5 inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

labelled (pencil): West[minste]^r Bridge, Abbingdon (sic) S^t, Old Palace Yard, Parliament Street, King Street, Banqueting House, Parliament S^t, Horse Guards, S^t James's Park, Parade, G[rea]^t George S^t, Storeys Gate, Wrong, This Side

Signed and dated

(pencil) April 9^th 1828

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, sepia, blue, green and pink washes with single ruled border on laid paper with one fold mark (245 x 354)

Hand

?George Bailey (1792-1860, pupil then assistant 1806-37, curator 1837-60)

Watermark

fleur-de-lis above cartouche with bar and below, ornate CA

Notes

Drawing 271 shows Soane's idea for developing Westminster around his new buildings. He proposes to demolish several buildings along King Street so as to open up an uninterrupted vista between Westminster Abbey and the new government buildings on Whitehall. The unbuilt range is labelled as 'wrong'. Soane's alterations to the old Foreign Office and 10-12 Downing Street are also shown and, in a lighter shade of pink, his unexecuted designs for a new entrance to the House of Lords from Old Palace Yard (q.v., for example, SM 16/7/4-5). See also separate catalogue entries under Soane: Office of Works: Old Foreign Office, Downing Street and Soane: Office of Works: 10-12 Downing Street.

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).