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Notes
Adam Street was one of the principal thoroughfares within the Adelphi complex, running through the eastern part of the site, from the Strand at its north end, to the riverfront at its south end. It backed up against another development, and its houses, particularly numbers 1-11 on the east side, were very small, with tiny light wells at the back behind the staircase, providing natural light to the rear rooms.
Numbers 19 and 20 (later 1a Royal Terrace) were demolished along with the rest of the central block of the Adelphi in 1936, and much of the rest of the street was demolished piecemeal. Number 18 (the former Adelphi Tavern) survives as part of the Royal Society of Arts building, and the façades of numbers 6-10 survive, but much of the fabric behind has been replaced.
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 Adam Street
- Number 1, Adam Street
- Number 2, Adam Street
- George Hesse, interior decoration and furnishings for number 1 or 2, Adam Street
- Number 3, Adam Street
- Number 4, Adam Street
- Number 5, Adam Street
- Number 6, Adam Street
- Number 7, Adam Street
- Number 8, Adam Street
- Number 9, Adam Street
- Number 10, Adam Street
- Number 18, Adam Street: Adelphi Tavern
- Number 19, Adam Street
- Number unknown, Adam Street: Mr Beckett's house
- Unknown houses, Adam Street