Design for improvements to Whitehall and Westminster

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / Design for improvements to Whitehall and Westminster

Browse

Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Office of Works
  - London: Board of Trade and Privy Council Offices, Whitehall & Downing Street: designs for new offices and scheme for the improvement of Downing Street, 1823-33 (284)
    - Designs for the new government buildings on Whitehall and the completion of Downing Street with a Triumphal Arch, December 1825-May 1833 (100)

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Reference number

SM (243a) 37/1/1

Purpose

Design for improvements to Whitehall and Westminster

Aspect

243a Plan of a Design for Improvements at Whitehall &^c by Sir John Soane

Scale

bar scale of 5/9 inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

as above, labelled: River Thames, Westminster Bridge, Embankment, Cotton Garden, Abingdon Street, Garden, Mews, Old Palace Yard, House of Lords, House of / Commons, Westminster Hall, New Palace Yard, St Margarets St, Bridge Street, Bridge Court, Cannon Street, Manchester Buildings, Derby Ct, Derby St, Parliament Street, Privy Garden, Whitehall / Chapel, Whitehall, Horse Guards, Secretary / of States / Office, Treasury, Treasury / Yard, Downing St, Fludyer (sic), King Street (twice), Crow (sic), ----- (illegible), Gardners Lane, George Yard, Great George St, Little George St, School, Sessions / House, Garden Square, St Margarets / Church, Westminster Abbey, Henry VII / Chapel, Poets Corner, Chapter / House, Little / Cloister, Little Deans Yard, Cloisters, Deans Yard, Deans Street, Tothill St, Longditch or Prince Street, Bennet St, Dartmouth / St, Queen St, Mews, Storeys Gate, St James Park, Delahay St, Duke Street, St James Park, Parade

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, blue, green and light red washes, pricked for transfer within multi-ruled sepia and black wash border on wove paper (241 x 448)

Hand

Soane Office

Notes

Soane saw the building of the Board of Trade and Privy Council Offices on Whitehall as an opportunity to "improve" the Westminster area by widening King Street to create a vista from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey. A similar drawing is SM 49/5/39. This drawing, however, must have been made earlier as it does not show the Lords' committee rooms added to the Palace of Westminster in 1826-7.

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).