Former Office Building Of Royal Dockyard, Deptford

This former office building of the Royal Dockyard at Deptford, now a private dwelling, was built in 1720 and significantly altered around 1805-6 when an attic storey was added and the interior remodelled according to specifications by Sir Samuel Bentham, Inspector General of Naval Works. The building underwent further refurbishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The building is constructed of brown brick laid in Flemish bond with red rubbed-brick dressings. The rear elevation uses English bond. The roof is covered in slate.

The ground floor plan remains largely as originally built, with three rooms divided by a cross passage running between the northern room (the Master Shipwright's office) and the central room. The staircase, dating from the 1805-6 alterations, is positioned against the rear wall south of the cross passage. There are chimneys at both ends of the building, plus a third stack on the south side of the cross-passage wall. The first floor originally comprised one large southern room and one smaller northern room, but was later modified to create four small rooms accessed by a narrow corridor from the stair landing. The attic floor follows a similar layout. The 1805-6 plan survives largely intact apart from some inserted partitions.

The front (west) elevation, substantially dating from 1720, has two storeys with a mansard attic added around 1805-6. It features a moulded brick cornice and stone coping. The nine-bay façade is framed by giant pilasters arranged in groups of 2:1:3:1:2, with entrances originally placed in the single bays; the southern doorway has been blocked and a new doorway inserted in the southernmost bay. The windows have segmental heads with gauged-brick arches and six-over-six pane sashes. Three ground-floor windows are late-Georgian originals; the remainder are replacements designed to match. The attic has four large dormers: one with six lights and three with three lights. These windows are 20th-century replacements, but their form is likely original, having been designed to maximise light for the drawing office.

The rear elevation rises a full three storeys with a parapet. The rear portion of the roof has a single pitch. The ground floor is painted. The northern section has five bays with segmental-headed windows and a central doorway. The first floor was rebuilt in 1805-6. The second floor is blind except for one inserted window. The southern section is set back slightly and is entirely blind.

Inside, the cross-passage has six-panelled doors on either side. The former Master Shipwright's office to the left (north) retains some early full-height panelling. The central room (the former Timber Master's office) has an unusual arrangement of diagonal ceiling beams associated with now-removed inserted partitions, and fireplaces on the north and south walls dating from around 1900. Recent investigation has identified a series of reused ships' timbers bearing timber marks, used as floor joists in the Timber Master's office and the adjacent room to the south. These timbers are estimated to date from the latter half of the 18th century. The southern room has some early full-height panelling and a fireplace on the south wall. The open-well staircase from 1805-6 has a closed string, stick balusters and a matchboard inner string rising to the first floor. The upper-floor rooms are separated from the corridor by panelled partitions. The deep, canted chimneybreast in the northern room appears to have been modified to accommodate a stove. Features throughout include dado panelling, plain full-height panelling, four-panelled doors and matchboard ceilings.

Deptford was established as a centre for naval shipbuilding by the late 15th century. The accession of Henry VIII in 1509 marked a massive programme of naval expansion: Woolwich Dockyard was established in 1512, and in 1513 Henry began developing Deptford by building a great storehouse. By the 1540s 'the King's Yard' at Deptford had become by far the most important royal dockyard nationally for constructing and repairing warships. Sir Francis Drake was knighted here in 1581, and his Golden Hind was displayed at the site as a visitor attraction for over seventy years. During the 17th century it was the second major centre for shipbuilding after Chatham, which had been established under Elizabeth I and gained pre-eminence. The Navy Board appointed a Master Shipwright at both locations. In 1698 Tsar Peter the Great came to Deptford for three months to learn shipbuilding techniques. Its proximity to the Navy Board Office in the City of London meant it was frequently chosen for experimental construction. However, the shifting of hostilities to France and Spain in the 18th century meant that Portsmouth and Plymouth gained pre-eminence. Several well-known vessels were fitted out at Deptford, including Captain Cook's Endeavour and Discovery, as well as ships used in Nelson's campaigns. Despite navigational difficulties due to the silting up of the Thames, and the Yard's consequent inability to service larger ships, further expansion took place in the 18th century when the dockyard reached an area of some thirty acres. After 1815 it fell into decline, closing in 1869 when the site was acquired by the Corporation of London for use as London's Foreign Cattle Market. The handsome late-17th-century officers' terraces, which stood to the south, were demolished in 1902. The dockyard suffered massive destruction during the Second World War, and was redeveloped as warehousing known as Convoy's Wharf in the 1950s, when the remains of the bomb-damaged Tudor storehouse were demolished.

The Office Building and adjoining Master Shipwright's House stood in the dockyard's north-east corner, alongside the great Double Dry Dock. An annotated sketch plan of 1623 by the diarist John Evelyn, who lived at Sayes Court to the west, and subsequent plans of the late 17th century, indicate that the present buildings occupy the site of a single-storey range of the late 16th or early 17th century. The Master Shipwright's house was rebuilt in 1709, and a proposal to rebuild the 'very rotten and decayed' offices is recorded in 1720, to be replaced by 'new offices of two storey high in which the storekeeper may be accommodated. The charge of which besides the old material will amount to about 350....' Work was well advanced by August 1720. The building housed the offices of the Master Shipwright and his assistants.

In 1805, Sir Samuel Bentham (1757-1831), appointed Inspector General of Naval Works in 1796, submitted detailed proposals to the Admiralty to remodel and extend the Deptford dockyard offices. These alterations formed part of Bentham's rationalisation of naval dockyard functions nationally, to facilitate his principle of 'central inspection', a concept which permeated his approach to naval dockyard reform in imposing central control and accountability to all its functions, notably the management of timber. The post of Timber Master was consequently created in each naval dockyard, responsible to the Master Shipwright, to oversee the receipt, conversion and use of every single piece of timber, to minimise wastage and end the practice of purloining of 'chips' or offcuts by employees. The principle of central inspection was more manifestly embodied in the design for a 'Panopticon' prison by his philosopher brother Jeremy, an idea which Samuel initially developed as a means of inspecting a large workforce during his eleven-year stay in Russia, where he oversaw the construction of warships for Prince Potemkin.

A Timber Master's office was installed in the central ground-floor room (in which evidence of saw-pits has been discovered). The new offices, in the remodelled first floor and a new attic storey, comprised the shipwrights' repository, drawing room, two assistants' offices and a model room, which enabled the close working and supervision of the Master Shipwright's subordinates. The alterations were completed in 1806, almost exactly to Bentham's plan.

This building is designated at Grade II* as the earliest surviving purpose-built dockyard office, predating examples at Portsmouth and Chatham by several decades. It represents a rare survival of an early 18th-century naval building and the 1805-6 remodelling constitutes a rare survival of a naval drawing office from the Napoleonic Wars. Together with the adjoining Master Shipwright's House, these are the sole remaining buildings of the 18th- and early 19th-century naval dockyard, occupying the same site as their Tudor and Stuart predecessors, at one of the earliest sites connected with Britain's emergence as a world naval power. The well-documented changes made under Sir Samuel Bentham form an important part of the history of naval dockyard reforms.