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The Inn is now known as the Hardwicke Arms and is on a former Roman road (98 Ermine Way, Arrington). Listed Grade II, it had 'two principal building periods in C18'. A photograph (www.English Heritage Images of England 52684) shows it as a red brick, timber framed series of attached one and two storey buildings. In Soane's time it was a coaching inn which explains the coach house and the generous stabling. The brew house allowed the inn keeper to make his own beer that might then be drunk in the tap room while the kitchen, dairy and wine cellar would have served the dining room and parlour.
The Inn was owned by Philip Yorke who became 3rd Earl of Hardwicke in 1790. Soane had met Yorke when he was in Italy making his Grand Tour (1778-1780). He had been employed for buildings at Hamels Park, Hertfordshire from 1781 (q.v.) and at Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire from 1790 (q.v.). Soane's work at Wimpole included a gate and lodges on the Arrington Road, c.1794.
Adshead (op.cit above) wrote that 'Soane occasionally stayed at the inn, which was then known as the Tyger orTiger. The Tiger Inn appears to have been remodelled in 1723' whe, for example, the brewery was repaired.
Jill Lever
Level
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).