| Description | The documents listed here are the contents of the box formerly listed as 'MBP Box 341. Soho House and Garden'. The papers include estimates, calculations, price lists, reports, inventories, memoranda, letters, etc. Most of the material relates to the period after Matthew Boulton's death in 1809, and there are also some papers from the period after the death of Matthew Robinson Boulton, in 1842.
Any original scheme of arrangement was not clear from the previous list.
Five original bundle wrappers are present, and an attempt has been made to group related documents together under those wrapper headings. The remaining documents have been grouped under 'Inventories' and 'Sale at Soho House'.
The bundle 'Soho House Repairs Specifications & details' includes alterations made for the incoming tenant, Reverend George D. Boyle, in June 1860.
Within these groups, the documents have been arranged in chronological order. Many of the documents, however, particularly those concerning Matthew Boulton's purchases of land in the 1790s, are not dated. Dockets on the documents are mainly in the hand of Matthew Robinson Boulton.
The document groups are as follows:
Nos. 1 - 23: 'House & Domestic Economy - Servants Allowances &c &c &c'. (1797-1832): mainly miscellaneous household matters.
Nos. 24 - 37: 'Homestead Farm Grounds Tithes & proprietor's arrangement.'. (1801-1842)
Nos. 38 - 67: 'Horticulture '. (1805-1822 and n.d.): plants and gardening.
Nos. 68 - 112: 'Servants' Allowances Wages &c.', (1809-1841): mainly memoranda about the employment of various servants.
Nos. 113 - 136: 'Soho House Repairs Specifications & details', (1860 and n.d.); mainly to do with work done at Soho House in preparation for letting it.
Nos. 137-147: Inventories, (1851-1860 and n.d.) Lists of furniture, fixtures, portable items, stable equipment and garden tools.
Nos. 148-170: Sale at Soho House, 3-4 July 1860. Sale catalogues and notes of prices achieved.
Nos.171-209: Estate. (1790s and n.d.) Calculations for acquisitions of land, etc.
In some cases in the old list, documents of more than one page had an individual catalogue number given to each sheet; where this occurred, this has now been changed to a number for the whole document followed by a-b, etc. for the individual pages, to be consistent with other parts of the catalogue.
There were a number of photographs of Soho House in the [MBP 341] box. These have now been moved to MS 3782/21/ : 'Additions'.
Typed notes on the Soho House stove, 1957 have also been moved to MS 3782/21/ : 'Additions'.
Dockets are given in the description; any information added by the cataloguer is in square brackets. |