Browse
In 1774 the lease was purchased by Robert Burdett Esq, who paid a rent of £300 for that year. Burdett is unknown, but it is possible that he was Sir Robert Burdett, 4th Baronet (1716-97) of Bramcote, Warwickshire, who served as MP for Tamworth in 1748-68. Burdett retained the lease for only one year, whereupon it was acquired by a lady called Mary Griffith.
Number 13 is one of the surviving houses, and bears a blue plaque to indicate that John Loughborough Pearson and Sir Edwin Lutyens both lived and died there in 1881-97 and 1919-44 respectively. Unfortunately, little of the Lutyens interiors survive, but Adam's two drawing room ceilings and the stairwell ornamentation do remain in situ. It remains a private residence, and there is currently a proposal to develop the house and its neighbour at number 11 into a single private dwelling.
Literature:
See Mansfield Street scheme notes.
Frances Sands, 2013
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).
Contents of Mansfield Street, number 13
- Design for a ceiling for the front drawing room for John Devall, 1772, as executed (1)
- Preliminary design and finished drawing for a ceiling for the rear drawing room for John Devall, 1772, as executed (2)