Ze7 Lippitts Hill: Office And Chapel Building

Office and Chapel Block, built in 1939-40 by the War Office.

Materials: a timber-framed, single-storey range with timber rusticated weatherboard cladding, standing on a brick plinth, with a felted, shallow-pitched timber roof and off-centre brick ridge stack. Metal framed casement windows are evident throughout.

Plan: U-shaped in plan.

Exterior: the six-bay, single-storey Office and Chapel Block sits on a brick plinth and has a plank and batten timber door to the recessed centre in the front (east) elevation. Both arms of the U-shaped building have a double pile roof, suggesting two, two-bay huts have been attached to a longer, six bay range. With few exceptions each bay of the west elevation and those to the east are defined by pairs of multi-paned metal-framed windows with a horizontal glazing bars. Other bays and gable ends have similar glazing patterns but some are single rather than double windows.

Interior: the Office and Chapel Block is accessed via a central door in the east elevation. The interior is utilitarian throughout with lined walls and ceilings and a corridor running north to south, providing access to small offices, WCs and locker rooms off each side, as well as one room possibly formerly a chapel, now a workshop. Throughout, there survives 'high waisted' doors of the 1930s, with one panel set above three vertical ones, consistent with other buildings of the same phase on the site. One room retains some stencilling in foliate designs to the ceiling, and a heavy brick stove, thought to be of central European design, suggesting that this room was modified for the use of German prisoners of war, perhaps as a chapel. The north-east room has been subsequently cased internally in bullet-proof material.