[13] Ground and first floor plans

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Town houses
  - Reading, Berkshire: Friar Street, house for Lancelot Austwick, 1796 (32)
    - Designs made April 1796 (4)

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Reference number

SM 2/7A/8

Purpose

[13] Ground and first floor plans

Aspect

Plans of Ground floorr and One Pair

Scale

bar scale of 1/5 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, rooms labelled: Entrance, China Closet, Best Staircase, Passage for pipes of wine, Lobby (twice), Water Closet and dimensions given, (pencil) Window (verso) Lancelot Austwicke Esq^re / Reading / Berks . A Single Sheet and post marked High Holborn and 17 / D 13 / 96 with impression of a wax seal

Signed and dated

13/04/1796
L. Inn Fields Ap: 13 1796
13/04/1796
13/04/1796
L. Inn Fields Ap: 1796

Medium and dimensions

Pen, light red and yellow washes, pencil additions, with single ruled border on thin wove paper with four fold marks, modern repairs (551 x 335)

Hand

Henry Hake Seward (1778 - 1848), pupil and assistant May 1794 - September 1808. Information from the Soane office Day Book, entry for 13 April 1796.

Notes

The drawing was sent by post to Reading. Revisions involve the absorption of the left-hand passageway into the main body of the house. There is now an entrance to the front of the house as well as a side entrance on the right-hand side. Symmetry has been lost since there are two windows on one side of the central entrance and single window on the other. The first floor has five windows to the front. The stair is now on the right-hand side of the house - it had been located on the left-hand side and then towards the centre on previous drawings. The pencil adjustments adds one foot to a bedrom and reduce by one foot another of the upstairs rooms.
The reference to 'Passage for pipes of wine' suggests that Austwick was a wine merchant. A pipe is the second largest size of wine cask and was thus equivalent to half of a tun, or 105 (Imperial) gallons. See drawing [22] verso for a design for the wine cellar. Drawing [1] had a mention of 'Brew House' so he may also have been a brewer.

Level

Drawing

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).