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Notes
Robert Street was one of the smaller thoroughfares within the Adelphi complex, located in the western part of the site, running from the central road, John Street at its north end, to the riverfront at its south end.
Numbers 1-3 Robert Street were some of the earliest buildings in London to be built as chambers or tenements. They survive, although the original buildings have been much altered. A dormer storey was added to the block in 1908 when the three buildings were conjoined as Adelphi Terrace House, then being divided again and becoming the home of E. Temple Thurston in 1909-10, Joseph Pennell in 1909-17, John Galsworthy in 1917-18, Margaret Bondfield in 1925-26, and Sir James Barry in 1911-37. Numbers 4 and 5 Robert Street were demolished along with the rest of the central block of the Adelphi in 1936.
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 Robert Street
- Number 1, corner of Robert Street and John Street
- Number 3, corner of Robert Street and Royal Terrace