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Number 8 Royal Terrace was the ninth house in the terrace, located towards the western end of the block, overlooking the River Thames.
This house was an Adelphi lottery prize valued at £3,600. The first tenant was Sir Edward Dering (1732-98) of Surrenden, Kent who lived in the house for one year from 1776. From 1778 it was the home of Sir Archibald Macdonald (1747-1826), Attorney General; in 1794-1820 it was occupied by Dr Thomas Monro (1759–1833), physician at Bridewell and Bethlem Hospitals, and a good amateur artist who regularly entertained Turner and Girtin; in 1864-68 Sir Arthur William Blomfield (1829-99), architect, had his offices on the first floor while at the same time on the ground floor was the Reform League. Finally, in 1926 until its demolition in 1936 the house was home to the British Drama League.
Level
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).
Contents of Number 8, Royal Terrace
- Design for the ceiling for the front drawing room, 1770, executed at number 10 Royal Terrace (1)
- Design for the chimneypiece for the front drawing room, c1770-71, unexecuted (1)
- Design for the ceiling for the back drawing room, 1770; it is not known if this design was executed (1)
- Design for the chimneypiece for the back parlour, c1770-71, unexecuted (1)