Langley Park, Norfolk: unexecuted designs for gateway and (? hunting) lodge in a primitive, rustic style and executed designs for two entrance lodges for Sir Thomas Proctor-Beauchamp, Bt., 1784-1790 (13)

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Langley Park, Norfolk: unexecuted designs for gateway and (? hunting) lodge in a primitive, rustic style and executed designs for two entrance lodges for Sir Thomas Proctor-Beauchamp, Bt., 1784-1790 (13)

Signed and dated

1785
Main Year
1790
Other Years
1784-09-08
Scheme Year

Notes

Sir William Proctor-Beauchamp, 1st Baronet (c.1722-1773) assumed the surname and arms of Proctor in compliance with the testamentary injunction of his maternal uncle, George Proctor of Langley Park, Norfolk. (Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, 92nd ed., 1934). The Proctors had bought the Langley Park estate in 1739. Sir Thomas inherited Langley Park from his father in 1773.

Between September 1784 and August 1790 Soane made four separate designs for park buildings for Sir Thomas Proctor-Beauchamp as well as sending a 'Plan of a Design for Bath' and a 'Plan & Section of a Design for new Roofing the Mansions house' (15 March 1788, 'Ledger A') and other drawings for alterations, none of which have survived.

None of the variant designs for an entrance gateway (drawings 1-2) were accepted but a design for a gate with lodges in a simple Doric style (drawings 3-6) was carried out. Variant designs in a 'primitivist' style for a (hunting ?) lodge were not executed. A design for another gate with twin lodges in a more conventional style was built and (with the Doric lodges) still survives. The lodges were lived in up to about 1970 when, in their empty state, they were stripped of their lead and vandalised but they have since been restored.

Literature. P. du Prey, John Soane: the making of an architect, 1982, pp.256-8; D.Stroud, Sir John Soane, architect, 2nd ed., p.123; P.Dean, Sir John Soane and the country estate, 1999, p.171.

Jill Lever, June 2009

Level

Scheme

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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.

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Contents of Langley Park, Norfolk: unexecuted designs for gateway and (? hunting) lodge in a primitive, rustic style and executed designs for two entrance lodges for Sir Thomas Proctor-Beauchamp, Bt., 1784-1790 (13)