Chesters Museum

Chesters Museum is a museum that was commissioned before 1895 by Nathaniel George Clayton, who was the nephew of John Clayton, the owner of the Roman site of Chesters. The museum opened in 1903 after the deaths of Nathaniel and his son John Bertram, and it was built for Mrs. Nathaniel George Clayton by R. Norman Shaw. The building is constructed from coarse local sandstone that is rock-faced and snecked, with ashlar dressings, and features a graduated Lakeland slate roof with long glazed panels and an ashlar stack.

The museum is a tall single storey with five bays, and it includes a two-bay west wing that forms an L-shape. The extended pedimented west porch has a segment-headed door made of six fielded panels set within a rusticated architrave. The upper rustications of the architrave rise to a bracketed stone cornice hood. A cornice continues around the porch, which has a narrow left bay with a small window. The porch and all salient angles have quoins. The long elevations are blank, with windows located in the gable ends. The south end has two windows, one of which is blocked, and an oculus above. The windows are set in rusticated architraves with ovolo-moulded cills, and there are friezes and cornices above them; the oculus is also in an architrave. The eaves are deeply overhanging, supported by long oak braces resting on stone corbels, and there is a chimney on the gable peak. The eaves overhang even more on the long elevations, with the outer edges supported on similar long braces. The north gable end has an oculus and one window, while the west end of the wing features an oculus, a window, and a door. All openings, except for the north window, are in architraves, and all but the oculi are rusticated.

Inside, an entrance lobby leads to the main interior space, which has a hammer-beamed boarded roof; the wing also features a similar roof. There are corner fireplaces at the west angles of the main room and back-to-back in the L-shape. The openings are architraved with a swell frieze and cornice, and there is a corniced overmantel block. The interior includes good half-glazed panelled internal doors and a six-panel back door in the wing. A corbelled stone shelf, added around 1905, runs along the three outer walls of the main room to hold Roman sculptured pieces.