Design for improvements in Westminster, (Copy) 13 April 1824

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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)
      - Designs for improvements in Westminster (2)

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Reference number

SM 37/2/26

Purpose

Design for improvements in Westminster, (Copy) 13 April 1824

Aspect

Plan shewing projected Improvements in the vicinity of / Westminster Abbey and Whitehall in the 1803 (sic)

Scale

bar scale of 1/5 inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

as above, labelled: Westminster Bridge, The River Thames, Bridge Street, New Palace Yard, Westminster Hall, Old Palace Yard, Westminster Abbey Church, S^t Margaret's / Church, Parliament Street, Cannon Row, Whitehall, Downing Street, Fludyer Street, King Street, Great George Street, Duke Street

Signed and dated

13 April 1824
C.J.R. Copied April 13^nd (sic) 1824

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, yellow ochre and light blue washes within a triple-ruled black and sepia wash border on wove paper with one fold mark (728 x 1291)

Hand

Charles James Richardson (1806 - 1871)
Pupil February 1824 - January 1827.

Watermark

James Whatman Turkey Mill Kent 1824

Notes

This drawing relates to the work of the Westminster Improvements Commission, which totalled over £250,000 between 1799-1815. The area around Westminster Abbey, Westminster Hall and the Westminster Sessions House was opened up; slums to the north of the Abbey were cleared, making way for Garden Square, St Margaret's Street was widened and post-medieval additions to the historic structures were removed. This drawing shows a proposal for widening King Street from the Sessions House to Downing Street.

Tom Drysdale, October 2014

Literature

J. M. Crook and M. H. Port, The History of the King's Works, VI, 1973, pp. 515-6.
S. Sawyer, "Delusions of national grandeur...", Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 13, 2003, pp. 237-50.

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.

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