Designs for completing the buildings in Downing Street, 1828 (4)

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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 (272) 49/5/37 (273) 49/5/40 (274) 49/5/26 (275) 49/3/39

Purpose

Designs for completing the buildings in Downing Street, 1828 (4)

Aspect

272 Plan of the new government buildings 273 Three elevations of the new government buildings 274 Plan and elevation of the new government buildings; (verso) two general plans of the new government buildings 275 Elevation of the Triumphal Arch and the range containing the Home Office, Board of Trade and Privy Council Offices; (verso): elevation of the New State Paper Office

Scale

(272) bar scale of 1/5 inch to 10 feet (273, 274) bar scales of 5/12 inch to 10 feet (274 verso) bar scale of 1/5 inch to 10 feet (275 verso) bar scale of 1/9 inch to 1 foot

Medium and dimensions

(272) Pen, sepia and burnt Sienna washes, pricked for transfer on wove paper with one fold mark (389 x 457) (273) pen, sepia and burnt Sienna washes, pricked for transfer on wove paper (541 x 748) (274) pen, sepia, pink and burnt Sienna washes, (verso) pencil, pricked for transfer on wove paper (521 x 739) (275) pen, sepia, grey, pink and burnt Sienna washes, pricked for transfer on two sheets of wove paper, affixed (315 x 427)

Hand

(272-275) Soane office

Watermark

(273, 274) Smith & Allnutt 1823

Notes

Drawing 272 shows, in pencil, the line of the front of the old government buildings on Whitehall. The lower Triumphal Arch has been added later and suggests that Soane was not at this point fully decided on the location of the Arch.
Drawing 273 shows three variant designs for the new buildings and Triumphal Arch. The left (south) half of the top design is copied at the bottom of the sheet. The building shown in burnt Sienna wash to the left (south) of the new buildings is a replica of the old tennis court. The main difference between the designs is the treatment of the attics.
On drawing 274 is another design for the new Home Office with a portico of six columns slightly projecting from a front that is wider than the other corner pavilions. The same design is shown on drawing 275. The Soane office drawings for the New State Paper Office, which is shown on the verso of drawing 275, will be catalogued in 2014.

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).