World War II Bofors gun tower and ancillary building

MATERIALS: reinforced concrete frame and platforms with brick infill.

DESCRIPTION: the tower, located at the north-east corner of the football ground, comprises two elevated platforms, approximately 5m high, located immediately adjacent to each other, leaving a narrow gap between them at platform level. The Bofors gun would have been mounted on the larger (north-western) platform and its range predictor (to calculate enemy aircraft speed and height and thus ensure the accuracy of the gun) on the smaller (south-eastern) one. This was so that the gun’s recoil did not disrupt the predictor. The raised hexagonal concrete mount for the Bofors gun is located in the centre of the gun platform. It is not known whether the steel holdfast frame survives.

The concrete frame of the platforms has full-height brick infill which has been extended to the rear (north-east) of the range predictor platform to form a concrete-roofed extension. This had a large opening in the south-eastern elevation, now blocked. Small openings with concrete frames are set high in the brickwork to provide ventilation. There is another large blocked opening in the north-east wall of the infill of the gun platform.

Internally, the range predictor platform has two floors and the gun platform just one. An external concrete staircase along the south-east elevation provides access from the ground floor to the first floor ammunition store in the range predictor tower (the entrance door in the south-west elevation is bricked up) and then up to the roof. At ground level, the range predictor tower has a pillbox-type room with a low ceiling.

The gun platform has a single high-ceilinged room on the ground floor. This room and that in the outshut at the rear of the range predictor platform would have housed the operations room and generator. Between the two platforms is a full-height ‘entrance lobby’ with an entrance in the south-west elevation. The brick infill to create this lobby is presumably post war as it would have interfered with the deliberate separation of the two platforms.

25m to the north-east of the tower is a single-storey, rectangular plan building built of brick with a flat reinforced-concrete roof. It has an entrance on its south-east elevation and a narrow, triple-light metal framed window set high up in the opposite elevation. This was probably either a magazine for the Bofors gun or a shelter for the off-shift gun crew, and is included in the listing.