Gibraltar Barracks The Keep

Armoury, guard house, and store for the Suffolk Regiment Localisation depot, now The Suffolk Regimental Museum. The building dates to 1877 and was designed by Major HC Seddon RE at the War Office. It is constructed of red brick laid in English Bond, with white brick and stone dressings, and has a flat roof. The building is three storeys high, with two four-storey towers, one at the north-west corner and a taller tower at the south-east corner. The corners of the building at the north-east and south-west are rounded. The north and south facades feature six windows per storey, containing small-paned cast-iron sashes, with shaped stone heads and projecting sills. A band of plain white brick runs at sill level on each storey, and another white brick band with guilloche ornament links the tops of all windows. A high crenellated parapet tops the walls, stepped up slightly at the north-east corner. Small slit windows are located in both rounded corners. The towers, which contain the stairs, have three narrow stepped windows on each storey; the top stage is marked by a white brick course with guilloche ornament and diaper patterning in blue headers. Crenellations sit above a row of stone machicolations. The interior is reported to be fire-proof, with open well stone stairs in the towers and jack arch floors supported by iron columns. This is the only remaining building from a larger depot complex, which ceased use in 1960 following the amalgamation of the Suffolk Regiment into the East Anglian Regiment in 1959. The other buildings were subsequently demolished. The keep served as a characteristic building for Localisation depots, a feature of the Cardwell reforms intended to strengthen ties between regiments and their local communities to aid recruitment, raising the local profile of the barracks and providing a symbolic focus for the regiment. It is one of only nine surviving examples of this type of building.