Reading, Berkshire: Seven Bridges Street now Bridge Street: brewery for William Blackall Simonds, 1789-1790; house for Mr Simonds fronting the brewery, 1789; additions and alterations to the original house, 1802-1803 (34)

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Reading, Berkshire: Seven Bridges Street now Bridge Street: brewery for William Blackall Simonds, 1789-1790; house for Mr Simonds fronting the brewery, 1789; additions and alterations to the original house, 1802-1803 (34)

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Notes

The father of William Blackall Simonds (1761-1834) left his brewing business to his only son in 1782. The following year, the young man married Elizabeth May who brought with her a dowry of £2,000. In 1785 Simonds opened his first permanent brewery in Broad Street in Reading and when the business expanded so quickly that it outgrew the site, he bought another in Seven Bridges Road and commissioned Soane to design a brewery and a house. The brewery was built between 1789 and 1790 and the house was finished in 1791. In December 1802, survey drawings (6-10) were made of the house as a preparation for Soane's designs for alterations and additions made in January, February and (working drawings) March and June 1803. The brewery flourished and W.B.Simonds also established a bank in Reading and was its Mayor. (Information from www.berkshirehistory.com/bios/wbsimonds.html)

The enlarged house of 1803 was demolished early in the twentieth century, by which time Soane's brewery had been rebuilt.

See also - Reading, Berkshire: Castle Street and Reading, Berkshire: London Place for designs for a house and for speculative housing by Soane for Mr Simonds.

Jill Lever, January 2012

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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 Reading, Berkshire: Seven Bridges Street now Bridge Street: brewery for William Blackall Simonds, 1789-1790; house for Mr Simonds fronting the brewery, 1789; additions and alterations to the original house, 1802-1803 (34)