Royal Army Medical College Southern Block Facing Courtyard

Royal Army Medical College Southern Block Facing Courtyard

Medical college built 1904–7 by architects J.H.T. Wood and W. Ainslie for the Royal Army Medical Corps. The building uses strong red brick with Portland stone dressings, a Westmorland slate roof, and brick chimney stacks with stone banding.

The plan comprises a tall north-west-facing entrance block with loggia, entrance hall and lecture theatre at the centre, flanked by laboratories, with a single-storey classroom block to the rear.

The exterior is designed in Imperial Baroque style. The principal north-west elevation displays three storeys across five bays in the centre, linked by a dentilled cornice and dominated by two domed Kentian towers of Portland stone with Gibbsian windows. These towers flank three inner bays with a loggia arcade, beneath which the rusticated ground floor opens. Above are first-floor sash windows with radial heads set in Gibbsian semi-circular arched surrounds with a stone band linking the keystones. A continuous band of attic windows with Gibbsian surrounds sits below the entablature. The flanking wings are four bays wide, consisting of two storeys over a basement with similar cornice and dormer windows set in hipped roofs. The cross windows have casements set in Gibbsian surrounds with tall keystones; those to the ground floor, which features continuous stone banding, display an unusual swept pediment design set into a heavy stone plat band. The rear single-storey classroom block has a north-east return along Atterbury Street with two Gibbsian windows set between paired Ionic pilasters below segmental pediments. The plain south-east elevation faces the Officers' Mess and is connected to this building by a covered first-floor link with an upper tier of wood casements.

The interior is generally plain, with inserted ceilings to classrooms and a reseated lecture theatre. Laboratory spaces feature mosaic floors and half-glazed doors. Dog-leg stairs flank the entrance hall, with banded green and white stone facing to the walls and alternate bays of coffered segmental vaulting and groined vaulting set on a dentilled cornice. The first-floor library features a dentilled cornice beneath a panelled vaulted ceiling, and an upper tier with an iron balustrade set over a fine set of bookcases with margin panes to glazed cupboards above panelled cupboards.

Following post-Crimean War military reforms and new hospital plans, the medical services of the British army underwent further refinement as part of the Balfour Administration's (1895–1905) updating of military structure and support services. A direct result of this, and the urgent need to combat poor hygiene standards and disease that claimed more soldiers' lives during the Boer War than enemy action, was the construction of this complex for the newly-formed Royal Army Medical Corps (established 1898) at Millbank. The building is more directly comparable to civilian than military hospitals of the period, reflecting the status the RAMC held in the medical world. The college existed to instruct officers with academic medical training, with hygiene and tropical medicine as the two most important areas, where the college made significant medical advances. The RAMC's commitment to incorporating the best in modern hospital and laboratory design led them to commission Wood and Ainslie, a civilian firm best known for hospital work and for whom this was their most prominent commission. The style was chosen to complement the earlier barracks on the site.