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Notes
John Street (now John Adam Street) was one of the principal thoroughfares within the Adelphi complex. It provided a central spine road through the site, running from York Buildings at its west end, to Adam Street at its east end. The road now extends 8- metres further west to Villiers Street.
John Street contained a variety of buildings, including Adam’s extant Royal Society of Arts building at the centre on the north side, and a terrace of houses on the south side which echoed the houses on the Royal Terrace side of the central block. These houses were smaller than the Royal Terrace houses, with small staircases, no river view, and their sun-filled southern rooms at the back. These 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 John Street
- Number 3, John Street
- Royal Society of Arts, numbers 18 and 19 (later 8 and 6) John Street
- Number 20 (later number 4), John Street
- Unknown houses, John Street