Waggon Works (Front Range And Office)

LANCASTER

SD4862 CATON ROAD 1685-1/4/64 (West side) Waggon Works (front range and office)

II

Former waggon works, now office, warehouse, and part of factory. 1863-5. By EG Paley. For the Lancaster Carriage and Waggon Works Company. Roughly coursed rock-faced sandstone with rock-faced and ashlar dressings. Slate roofs. Caton Road front is a long range of single-storey workshops, with fairly regular fenestration, on either side of an entrance gateway which is marked by a tall clock tower and leads to an irregularly-shaped yard. To the right and left of the tower the walls are pierced by tallish windows, although at the far left (in what may have been a boiler house since it is marked by the brick base of a chimney) these windows are separated at regular intervals by small square windows. To the right of the tower and at the far left the roofs have clerestorey ventilation. Old photographs show a row of brick chimneys, now removed, rising from the front wall to the right of the tower between each window, originally serving blacksmiths' hearths. The tower is of 3 stages, with quoins which in the top stages form clasping pilasters. It has a high waggon entrance under a rusticated segmental arch with 4 linked round-headed windows of ashlar above, and a clock face on a slightly projecting panel in the top stage. This motif is repeated on the side elevations. The steep pyramidal roof is topped by a timber bell-chamber with 2 pointed trefoiled openings on each face and a pyramidal roof. The office block, within the courtyard and facing south, is of 2 storeys with a wide central bay between 2 semi-octagonal windows, all under a roof with bracketed eaves. The doorway and ground-floor windows have segmental heads; on the first floor the bay windows have straight heads and the paired windows above the door have round heads. INTERIOR: the office block contains a staircase with cast-iron balustrade. HISTORY: built alongside the Midland Railway Line, the works were finally closed in 1908 and in 1914 were taken over for use as an internment camp for enemy aliens. For a while the officer in charge was Robert Graves, who describes the experience in 'Goodbye to All That'.

Listing NGR: SD4840662941