London: House of Commons, Palace of Westminster: unexecuted designs for a new House of Commons, 1825-1833 (29) and executed design for a library and committee rooms, 1825-1830 (53)

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
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  - London: Palace of Westminster: designs for alterations and additions, 1793-1828 (499)

Purpose

London: House of Commons, Palace of Westminster: unexecuted designs for a new House of Commons, 1825-1833 (29) and executed design for a library and committee rooms, 1825-1830 (53)

Notes

The first permanent home of the Commons was the Chapel of St Stephen established in 1348 by Edward III as a college for secular canons and granted to the Commons by Edward VI in 1547. The origins of the House of Commons left their mark so that, for instance, the arrangement of choir stalls facing each other across the aisle was kept. As was the west screen with double doors at its centre which the Commons use so that those voting in favour of a motion take the right-hand door and those against, the left-hand door. Again, the custom of bowing towards the end of the Chamber as Members exit or enter has its origins in the altar that once stood in St Stephen's Chapel. There were changes to the Chapel so that the wall paintings were panelled over, plain glass replaced stained glass and green was adopted for the furnishings. In 1692 Christopher Wren (1632-1723) classicised the Chapel, adding galleries to each side and inserting a roof below the old vaulted one. The Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 introduced 45 new Members of Parliament, the Union of Great Britain with Ireland in 1801 created a hundred more increasing the total number to 658. To provide extra seats, James Wyatt (1746-1813) removed the Chapel's medieval furnishings and took the opportunity to make extensive Gothick alterations to the exterior. Soane's designs for an entirely new House of Commons, as with those by Wren and William Kent, came to nothing. The great fire on the night of 16 October 1834 made the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament essential.

Literature:
M. H. Port, The Palace of Westminster... 1834, 2011, pp. 525- 532; UK Parliament, <www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/building/palace/estatehistory/>

Jill Lever, February 2014

Level

Scheme

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).

Contents of London: House of Commons, Palace of Westminster: unexecuted designs for a new House of Commons, 1825-1833 (29) and executed design for a library and committee rooms, 1825-1830 (53)