Herbert Pavilion And Attached Front Railings, Perimeter, And Retaining Walls

Herbert Pavilion and Attached Front Railings, Perimeter, and Retaining Walls

A military hospital, now converted to flats, built between 1859 and 1865 for the Royal Herbert Military Hospital in Woolwich. It was designed by Captain Douglas Galton RE, with R O Mennie serving as Surveyor of Works to the War Department. The conversion to residential use took place around 1992.

The building is constructed of white Suffolk bricks with Bath stone dressings, incorporates fireproof internal construction, and is topped with a slate hipped roof.

The plan is symmetrical, organised around a spine corridor with wards positioned on either side at the ends. A shorter central rear ward connects to a front chapel and library within a central courtyard, with an H-shaped front entrance and administration block facing Shooters Hill Road.

The exterior displays Italianate style. The front range rises to three storeys plus basement, with a 3:9:5:9:3-window arrangement across its width, while the pavilion wards are two storeys plus basement with 9-window ranges. The former administration block has angled and central sections projecting forward, decorated with clasping rusticated pilaster strips, plat bands, balustrading beneath the windows, a deep bracketed cornice and parapet. The centre features banded ashlar rustication to two storeys, with a large round through-archway opening to the central courtyard. Flanking sections have flat-headed ground-floor windows and round-arched upper windows without architraves. The ward blocks feature plat bands and cornice, flat-headed 6/6-pane sash windows, and articulated corner sanitary towers containing narrow lights and wide round-arched end casement windows. The chapel displays a 3-window north end with clasping pilaster strips, round-arched ground-floor and second-floor openings with a central doorway, and a central first-floor balcony incorporating a round clock face; the sides are punctuated by tall round-arched windows. The wards connect via a single-storey covered way spanning the full building width; a single-storey former isolation ward stands at the east end, and a two-storey annexe formerly containing an operating theatre at the west end. Open walkways with cast-iron supports connect the front range to the wards and chapel.

The interior, though not inspected, is noted as fireproof construction with iron stairs on trussed girders and concrete floors. The chapel reportedly contains a gallery on iron posts and an elliptical-arched ceiling.

Subsidiary features include quadrant decorative iron railings with cast-iron coping connecting the ends of the front range to large piers and cast-iron lamps, extending approximately 100 metres west and approximately 700 metres east along Shooters Hill Road, Well Hall Road and Broad Walk to the west and rear. A battered retaining wall encloses a terrace to the south of the former hospital.

The Royal Herbert was the first large-scale hospital to embody the pavilion concept of separate, cross-lit wards with good ventilation, wash rooms and lavatories separated by a lobby in corner towers. The building's plan was of great importance in developing hospital design and incorporated advanced systems of construction, heating and ventilation, reflecting the influence of sanitary reformers including Florence Nightingale, who described the Herbert as "by far the finest hospital establishment in the United Kingdom, or indeed Europe". The pavilion principle subsequently dominated English hospital design for the next fifty years. The front range originally contained offices, accommodation for the Governor, and nurses' dormitories. The building remains remarkably complete, notably so for a hospital, set within its original grounds, and represents one of the most important examples of its type in the country.