Much of Dance's work was in London and especially in the City of London. He was unpaid assistant for three years and then successor (in 1768) to his father as Clerk of the Works to the City of London, a post in which he continued until 1815. Dorothy Stroud's list of 'Works' under London (Stroud pp.239-44) shows the quantity and variety of Dance's schemes, many of them inevitably civic and including town planning and street improvements as well as prisons and markets. Very little of the City work has survived, commercial expansion and redevelopment in the 'square mile' and the Corporation's lands outside having seen most of them demolished for rebuilding. The survivors, and there are only four, are: All Hallows church at London Wall - Dance's first work; the semi-Indian south front of the Guildhall, represented here by a drawing made for Soane; a house for John Wesley, touching in its refined simplicity, at 47 City Road - the evidence for Dance's authorship lying mostly in the building itself (with a few drawings at the Corporation of London Records Office and none at the Soane Museum); and the church of St Bartholomew-the-Less, West Smithfield, rebuilt by Dance in 1789, altered by Thomas Hardwick in 1823-5 and by P. C. Hardwick in 1842, and restored after bomb damage in World War II. Beneath the later, coarser work there is still, to a tutored eye, much of Dance's original design. A fragment of surviving building - one of the entrances to Newgate Gaol - is preserved at the Museum of London.
Dance designed little in the City of London for individual patrons. On the back of a drawing, made after January 1807, for the Royal College of Surgeons ([SM D5/5/15]) there are some calculations for fees owing on several jobs including £7.14.0 for Kersley's Compting House, which is likely to have been in the City of London though 'Kersley' does not appear in the London Directory of that time. On Dance's usual 5 per cent fee the building costs would have been £142.82, so it was a small job. Suviving drawings (mostly in the Corporation of London Records Office) show that Dance designed a number of shops. One set of drawings in the Soane Museum was made for an apothecary, William Prowting, for a site in Great Tower Street north of Lower Thames Street and between the Monument and the Tower. Here, Dance worked out one solution to a very common design problem in the City - that of 'living over the shop' - combining dignified living quarters, well lit and with a good central stair and separate entrance, with the practical requirements of a shop and counting house. The site, as could be expected in a city with a medieval street pattern and high land values, was tight and narrow though with the advantage of two street elevations.
Pevsner (1976, p.200) wrote that the 'headquarters of Georgian and even Early Victorian banks were like private houses, with the business rooms on the ground floor left and right of the entrance and the manager's living quarters above'. However, Dance's design for Martin's Bank in Lombard Street, which had to incorporate an existing alley, was not domestic in character but in a quiet way was an example of architecture parlante. The large stone arches of the raised ground floor banking hall, which in execution were separated by fluted pilasters on pedestals with boss-like capitals punctuating a banded and slightly stepped frieze, did not suggest domesticity nor, indeed, a shop. With the austere brick front above (behind which was accommodation for the managers and clerks) the impression was dignified and stable.
As Clerk of the Works to the City of London, Dance (and his office at the Guildhall) dealt through a number of committees with repairs, improvements, leases, valuations, surveys, preparations for civic and royal occasions, the maintenance of the Mansion House and of the Guildhall, and all sorts of other often mundane but necessary business. As well, Dance acted as Surveyor to St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics and to St Bartholomew's Hospital and his City 'savvy' and contacts would have been very helpful to the Trustees of these charitable institutions.
For other works in the City see 'Churches'; 'Prisons, courts and a lunatic hospital'; 'Town Planning and London Bridge'; and 'Dance and Soane'.
LITERATURE. N. Pevsner, A History of building types, 1976.
