Design for fitting up the old Parliament Office for records, 21 April 1826

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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)

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Reference number

SM 37/1/38

Purpose

Design for fitting up the old Parliament Office for records, 21 April 1826

Aspect

Plan of the Old Parliament Office / now fitted up for Records

Scale

bar scale of 1/2 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, labelled: Bookcase, Window / underneath and dimensions given

Signed and dated

21 April 1826
(in Soane's hand) 21 Ap^l 1826

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pink, yellow and sepia washes, pricked for transfer on wove paper (538 x 700)

Hand

Soane Office

Watermark

Smith & Allnutt 1823

Notes

The Jewel Tower was built between 1365-6 as a store for precious goods. Within the medieval Palace of Westminster complex it stood at the south west corner surrounded by a defensive moat. At some point in time before 1600 it was given over to the Clerk of the Parliaments and became a store for the records of the House of Lords until 1864 when the records were removed to Charles Barry's new Victoria Tower. This drawing, dated "21 April 1826", shows the second floor of the Jewel Tower "now fitted up for records". The bookcases are coloured yellow. Due to its separation from the Palace of Westminster the Jewel Tower survived the fire of 1834. It is now in the stewardship of English Heritage.

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/jewel-tower/history-and-research/history/

Tom Drysdale, November 2014

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).