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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 Public buildings
- Arrington, Cambridgeshire: survey of an inn for 3rd Earl of Hardwicke, c.1792 (1)
- Cambridge: Gonville and Caius College, alterations to the Hall, 1792 (3)
- Cambridge: St John's College, survey plan, 1792 (1)
- Cambridge: (unexecuted) University picture gallery, museum and lecture rooms for Senate House, 1791, and design for railings, 1792 (24)
- Hellesdon Bridge, near Norwich, Norfolk: unexecuted design, 1785 (1)
- London: Battersea: unexecuted competition designs for a prison for 300 women and a prison for 600 men (with drawings by George Dance), 1781-1782 (13)
- London: Constitution Hill: design for a lodge and house with dairy and with accommodation for cows, for H.M. Woods and Forests, 1795
- London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, Southwark for the Governors of Dulwich College, 1811-1813 (108)
- London: King's Theatre (Opera House): designs for an opera house, c.1790 (9)
- London: Paddington, Grand Junction Canal Company, designs for a badge or seal or medallion, 1793 (3)
- London: 103 Pall Mall, design for a shop front for Mr Crooke, 1790 (1)
- London: Royal Hospital, Chelsea for the Board of Commissioners, 1807-1835 (226)
- London: unexecuted design for an opera house to be built on the site of the garden of Leicester House, 1790, 1810 (11)
- London: Somerset House, Lords Commissioners of the Treasury: designs for alterations to offices, 1795 (8)
- London: St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, Islington: unexecuted competition designs, 1777 (9)
- Norwich, Norfolk: Blackfriars Bridge: contract, working and record drawings, 1783 and c.1785 (7)
- Norwich, Norfolk: Norwich Castle Gaol: survey, design, working and record drawings for Norwich City Corporation, 1788-1792 (57)
- Reading, Berkshire: Design for a market cross or obelisk for Edward Simeon, 1804 (3)
- Solihull, Warwickshire: design for a bridge for William Moland, 1785 (1)
- Winchester (Hants): Hyde Close, working drawings for an academy for the Revd Mr Charles Richards, 1795 (4)