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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).
Contents of Commercial buildings
- Bank of Scotland, designs for a building, c.1788-93, execution status unknown (2)
- Boydell Gallery, 90 Cheapside, London, designs for ornamentation for picture frames for Alderman John Boydell, 1784, possibly executed (3)
- Drummonds Bank, Charing Cross, London, 1777-1779, part executed (16)
- Drury Lane Theatre, Bridges (later Catherine) Street, London: designs for interior decoration for David Garrick, 1775 (3)
- Haymarket Opera House, Pall Mall, London, unexecuted plans, elevations and sections for the opera house, possibly for Hon. George Hobart, c1789 (28)
- Inn at Dunbar, East Lothian: Designs for chimney pieces for James Maitland, 8th Earl of Lauderdale, c.1791, executed status unknown (10)
- Lincoln’s Inn, London: unexecuted competition designs for new buildings (later known as Stone Buildings), commissioned by the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, 1771-74 (9)
- Lloyd's Coffee House, probably Freeman's Court, London: unexecuted designs for the building, 1772 (7)
- Red Lion Inn, Piccadilly, London, preliminary designs for alterations to an inn, ND, unexecuted (2)
- Red Lion Inn, Pontefract, designs for alterations and extensions, and for a new facade, 1776, as executed (4)
- Trades Hall, Glasgow: designs for a building for the Trades House, 1791-92, as executed (7)
- White's Chocolate House, 37-8 St James's Street, London, 1787, unexecuted (9)