Norway House (Former Officers' Mess)

Norway House, North Weald Bassett

This is the former Officers' Mess at RAF North Weald, designed by the Air Ministry's Directorate of Works and Buildings to drawing number 1524/25. The building is constructed of red brick with rusticated quoins, slate roofs and brick stacks.

The plan forms a complex group arranged symmetrically to the front. A hipped single-storey central block contains an ante-room, card room and writing room, connected to the main mess and billiard rooms behind. Adjacent to these are the kitchen and service ranges. Set back to each side are lower connecting corridors leading to two-storey wings containing single rooms arranged along central corridors. The whole composition creates a wide extended H-shape.

The exterior features timber cross-windows set within brick soldier arches with stooled concrete sills. The single-storey seven-bay central range has gablets to the outer hips. The main entrance porch is distinguished by engaged Tuscan columns supporting an entablature, with flanking rusticated quoins and double-leaf inner doors. A cupola containing a louvred clock tower sits on the central axis behind the entrance. The accommodation blocks have multi-bay returns with flat-roofed dormers.

Inside, the building contains dog-leg staircases and classical chimneypieces. The dining room is particularly notable, featuring a flat segmental plaster panelled ceiling above a continuous horizontal moulded architrave, panelled doors set in moulded architraves, wall pilasters and high-level windows.

Built as part of Trenchard's Home Defence Expansion Scheme from late 1923, this mess was one of the first buildings completed for the scheme, which involved the rebuilding of bases in a fighter belt stretching from Duxford near Cambridge to Wiltshire. North Weald was a sector station in Fighter Command's front-line 11 Group, which played a key role in the Battle of Britain. The mess design exemplifies the dispersal principle against aerial attack and represents a standard 1920s military building type. As one of the principal surviving structures on the former military base, it stands as a good example of inter-war fighter station architecture. The airfield retains 12 pillboxes and most original fighter pens on the perimeter, together with 14 of the original 23 frying-pan dispersals, despite remodelling for jet fighters in the 1950s. After Kenley and Debden, North Weald has the most complete survival of fighter pens among key aviation sites of this period.