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London: 54 Old Broad Street, City of London: survey and alterations for William Thornton (later Astell), 1800-18 (2)

Notes

Soane surveyed a house on the west side of Broad Street for William Thornton (who later changed his name to Astell for inheritance reasons) on 21 June 1800 and proposed alterations less than a month later. No drawings relating to these works survive, but the bills were settled by 1801. The two survey drawings catalogued here, attributed by Ptolemy Dean to Thornton's house on Broad Street, are dated 'May 12th 1808' and show the tenant to be a Mr Lewis Teissier, a merchant. References in Soane's archives to work for William Thornton at 'Winchester Street' probably concern these buildings, which no longer survive. Elsewhere, Soane worked for Thornton at Everton, Bedfordshire and several other buildings in London.

Literature:
P. Dean, Sir John Soane and London, 2006, p. 167.

Tom Drysdale, March 2015

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Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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 London: 54 Old Broad Street, City of London: survey and alterations for William Thornton (later Astell), 1800-18 (2)