The Magazine

The Magazine

This is a Grade II* listed building comprising a gunpowder magazine with associated service buildings, built in the neoclassical style using stock brick and Portland stone, with slate roofs to the end pavilions.

The site is organised around a courtyard enclosed by a perimeter wall. The south entrance range consists of a symmetrical neoclassical portico flanked by square single-storey pavilions to the east and west. According to a plan of 1881, the eastern pavilion housed a storekeeper's office and the western pavilion served as a 'shifting room', where personnel were required to change into regulation uniforms without metal fixtures that could create sparks. The portico is constructed in finely jointed yellow brick with a stone Doric hexastyle-in-antis portico, entablature and blocking course. The pavilion friezes lack triglyphs but feature wide moulded panels with guttae. Each pavilion has one window to the front and return, fitted with six-over-six pane sashes and topped with pyramidal roofs. The rear wall of the portico contains a central entrance with a stone architrave and timber panelled door. The flanking pavilions have entrances on their inner returns inside the portico, each with curved panelled timber porches featuring dentiled cornices. The north elevation of the portico, facing the courtyard, originally had an open lean-to loggia which was infilled in the twentieth century; a single jowled post remains visible.

The gunpowder magazine stands in the centre of the courtyard. It is one storey high with an attic, built in brown stock brick with stone dressings in an austere neoclassical manner. The pedimented attic rises above the roof of the portico. The south elevation comprises three bays. The central bay breaks forward slightly and contains a large tripartite blind window with a ventilation slit in the central light; a further slit in the left-hand bay is blocked, whilst the right-hand bay has had its slit removed to accommodate an entrance. The slits are offset through the thickness of the wall to prevent the ingress of sparks. The attic features a moulded stone cornice and a blind Diocletian window flanked by recessed panels. The north elevation is identical in design, though now obscured by later structures. Downpipes with hopper heads bearing the Royal cipher are dated 1805. The west elevation is symmetrical with slightly recessed ends, a central blind window flanked by entrances to the magazine chambers, each with a recessed panel above; the doors have been replaced. The attic contains a blind central window with three-over-six pane sashes to either side. The east elevation was originally identical, but the southern doorway has been blocked and the northern one enlarged.

The original yellow stock brick perimeter walls with moulded stone copings were raised in 1912 and now survive only in part.

The interior of the rooms flanking the portico has been modernised. The inner faces of the curved porches are panelled with reeded mouldings, and some panelled window shutters remain. The magazine interior comprises two parallel brick catenary vaults, now painted. Both vaults retain their overhead travelling crane systems, constructed in timber and supported on triangular trusses; these follow a standard type employed in gunpowder magazines and are now rare survivals. Mortices on the soffits of the tie-beams indicate the positions of the powder keg racking posts. The floors, originally timber supported on sleepers, are now concrete.

A late nineteenth-century guardhouse stands to the north, and twentieth-century infill structures exist within the perimeter walls; these are not of special interest.