Survey of the Palace of Westminster, 1760-66

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Office of Works
  - London: Palace of Westminster: designs for alterations and additions, 1793-1828 (499)
    - Additional drawings, surveys etc. (44)
      - Surveys of the old Palace of Westminster (13)

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Reference number

SM 37/1/24

Purpose

Survey of the Palace of Westminster, 1760-66

Aspect

Block plan (The General Plan)

Scale

bar scale of 1/4 inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

as above, labelled: King Henry / the VII^s / Chapel, Clerks / of / Parliament, Bridge / Office, Old Palace Yard, Abingdon S^t, Waghorn's / Coffee / House, Court of Requests, Communication Gallery, Painted / Chamber, House of Peers, Princes / Cham^r, Officers of State, Clerks / Rooms, Housekeeper, Parliament Stairs, Cotton Garden, Garden (twice), Clerk of the / House of Commons, Auditor of the Exchequer, Burgess^s Court, Westminster Hall, Ordinance (sic), Kings Bench Records, Auditors of Imprest, Augmentation Office, Law Exchequer, New Palace Yard, Stables, Court, Teller and / Usher of the / Exchequer, Land Tax / Office, Tellers, Public Offices, The Thames and dimensions given, viz. 118.4, 55.10, 64.0

Signed and dated

1760-66

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia and pink washes, pricked for transfer on laid paper (370 x 531)

Hand

unattributed

Watermark

fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche and below, GR

Notes

This plan shows the Palace of Westminster and adjoining buildings as they appeared between 1760 and 1766. The date range is provided by the collection of buildings to the west of Westminster Hall. A new building to house the records of the King's Bench, the Exchequer, the Remembrancer, the Pipe, the Augmentation and the Tally Offices and the offices of the Auditors of the Imprests and the Usher and Clerks of the Exchequer was designed in 1753 (most likely by John Vardy, 1717/18-65) to replace those buildings then occupying the east side of St Margaret's Street. The New Stone Building, as it came to be called, was erected in a piecemeal fashion beginning with the central block in 1755-60, followed by the southern range in 1766-69. The area to the north of the central block was cleared in 1793 and the northern block was built to Soane's designs 30 years later as part of the new Law Courts. This survey plan shows the central block containing the King's Bench records as executed with the projected outline of the north and south ranges in pink wash.

For other drawings of the New Stone Building in Sir John Soane's Museum, see SM 37/1/2-6.

Tom Drysdale, October 2014

Literature

H. M. Colvin, J. M. Crook, K. Downes and J. Newman, The History of the King's Works, V, 1976, pp. 425-31.

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).