After an abortive competition Dance, already Surveyor, became the architect of St Luke's Hospital, a charity supported by subscriptions as well as by charges. His designs for Newgate Gaol and Sessions House and Giltspur Street Compter were made as Clerk of the City's Works. Further London compters and court houses by Dance not represented by drawings in the Soane Museum are: the Borough Compter, Southwark, 1785-7, (demolished); Whitecross Street Penitentiary completed by W. Mountague, 1813-15 (demolished 1873). It is not known how Dance received a commission for a prison for Guernsey that, in any case, was built to another architect's design.
Newgate Gaol, Dance's first major scheme carried out as architect to the City of London, is his best-known building. Its massive, rusticated, blank walls and low doors with festoons of shackles above them conveyed the nature and purpose of retributive justice and imprisonment. Appropriate character or architecture parlante and 'the poetry of architecture' are important qualities in Dance's work. He never put these ideas in writing and we rely largely on Joseph Farington's diary for verbal clues. For example, an entry of 3 March 1797 relates to Edmund Burke's essay on 'the Sublime and Beautiful' which Dance considered 'a very excellent work. - That part on taste the best He has ever seen on the subject'. In Burke's sense of exciting ideas of pain, danger and terror Newgate was indeed 'sublime' as was, to a lesser degree, St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, another place of confinement, larger still than Newgate but more simply built of brick with an austere and uniform round-arched rhythm. Both buildings 'announced their purposes by their appropriate appearance, and no stranger has occasion to inquire for what they are intended'. (Humphrey Repton quoted by Kalman p.109).
Composed in plan and elevation into blocky masses that anticipated later 18th-century tendencies, Newgate was aesthetically advanced though its layout was superseded by Jeremy Bentham's radical planning. Accommodation and facilities were more innovatory in the later Giltspur Street Compter which responded more strongly to the ideas of John Howard, penal reformer and friend of Dance. The planning and many of the details of St Luke's Hospital were forward-looking and were taken up in asylum design.
George Dance the Elder's influence should not be overlooked. He had built the first St Luke's and had provided earlier, unexecuted designs for Newgate, both of which provided a sound springing board. His son's success in tacking two major buildings so early in his career must owe something to a maturity and professionalism developed within the paternal home and office as well as an expensive architectural education.
