James Sandby Padley was an English surveyor, architect and civil engineer who worked in Lincoln, England.

Charles Sandby, the younger son of a wealthy London banker, who lived in Partney, Lincolnshire between 1791 and 1794, having been "rusticated" from Oxford for having had an affair, and Elizabeth Padley, daughter of Richard and Elizabeth Padley (née Hill) of East Kirkby.

He also showed his skill as an artist in a variety of commissions, and his drawings of the Witham Shield and Newport Arch are noteworthy.

[3] In later life his business success appears to have limited the time Padley devoted to his antiquarian interests, although a few days before his death in 1881, he completed the manuscript for his major work The Fens and Floods of mid-Lincolnshire, with a description of the river Witham, in its neglected state before 1762, and its improvements up to 1825, which was published the following year.

The engraved prints in this publication are invaluable for the amount of information they contain about the state that they were in at the time, and particularly for the half-timbered Whitefriars, which has been much altered.