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  • image SM 36/2/1
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Reference number

SM 36/2/1

Purpose

[22] Variant design for the first floor of a new Parliament House and Law Courts

Aspect

General Plan of Westminster Hall / and Houses of Parliament as they now are and proposed to be / and how Courts of Justice may be Erected when required

Scale

bar scale of 1/3 inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

as above, labelled: Pallace (sic) Yard, St Margretts Lane, Fish Yard, Court of / Equity, Judges (4 times), Officers (4 times), Court (5 times), Court of / Exchequer, Jury (3 times), Court of / Common Please (sic), Court of / Kings Bench, Court of / Chancery, Lord / Chancellor, Master / of the / Rolls, Masters in / Chancery, Westminster Hall, Lobby, House of / Commons, King Henry the Seventh / Chapple (sic), Old Pallace Yard, Parliament Office, Dirty Lane, Coffee Houses, Court of Request, Gallery, Painted / Chamber, Robing / Room, Black / Rod, Princes / Chamber, Kings Privy / Chamber, House of Lords, Lobby, Clerks, Clerk, Mr Speakers / Closett (sic), Sergeant / att (sic) Arms, Court of Request, Black Rod / & Gentlemen / Ushers, Kings / Presence, House of Lords, Lobby, Vestibule, Lobby, House of Commons, Mr / Speakers / Chamber, Waiting / Room, Court, Conferance (sic), Court, Black Rod, Robing / Room, Prince / of Wales, Lord / Chancellor, Lord / Treasurer, Bishops, Lord / Privy / Seal, Lord / Great / Chamber / lain, Earl / Marshall, Committee (4 times), Lord Hallifax's / Garden, Thames, That part of the Plan shaded red is proposed / to be last Built // The Plan shaded faint with Black are the / Present Buildings

Signed and dated

  • 1739

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, yellow and red washes, pricked for transfer on laid paper with one fold mark (535 x 748)

Hand

John Vardy (1717/18 - 1765)

Watermark

fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche = IV

Notes

Frank Salmon believes this to be one of the drawings that was submitted to the Treasury on 20 August 1739. The new Parliament House is 280 feet wide and 210 feet deep, so that it encroaches into the river. According to a note on the drawing, 'That part of the Plan shaded red is proposed / to be last Built'. The design includes a proposal for new Law Courts adjoining Westminster Hall. The idea to erect new Law Courts would reappear as part of the Second 'Belvedere' Scheme.

See also TNA, WORK 29/3358 (24) and SM 36/2/2 (drawing [23]).

(Salmon, pp. 343-44)

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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).