Essex County Cricket Pavilion

Cricket pavilion, dating from 1886 and designed by Richard Creed for the Essex County Cricket Club. The building is timber-framed with rendered and colourwashed surfaces over a brick basement, and has a machine tile roof. It is constructed in a Vernacular Revival style.

The north elevation is the main block and rises two storeys high, with nine window bays on the ground floor. A ground-floor verandah is supported on square timber posts with arched braces to the arcade plate. A central half-glazed door is present, and a double-leaf door replaced a window in the third bay from the left, being inserted in 1935. The windows are nine-pane horned sashes, framed by exposed studs and rails. Doors opening into storerooms were added at each end of the elevation in 1935, when the two-bay east and west verandah returns were blocked. The first floor has an elaborated dormer with half-timbered end gables and a tatter central gable rising out of a hipped roof, topped with a square open cupola and weathervane. Overhanging eaves are supported on square timber posts in two registers beneath the central hip. There’s a continuous frieze of eight twelve-pane windows, plus a central half-glazed double-leaf door. Each end gable features a similar door, flanked by fifteen-pane windows on either side.

The side pavilions each have a central glazed door flanked by twelve-pane horned sashes, beneath a hipped roof with overhanging eaves supported on square timber posts. Boarded single-storey links were added in 1935, connecting the pavilions to the main block.

The rear (south) elevation has a central twin-gabled element with two four-light casements above which rises the taller central gable, containing one two-light casement in the attic. Tripartite dormer windows are visible on the main roof slopes on either side.

Inside, the central ground-floor room, known as the "tong room," has widened openings leading to the home (west) and visitors' (east) changing rooms. The first floor contains a players’ room (centrally) and a committee room to the west, both with plank-lined walls and boarded ceilings. Two further rooms are located to the east. The roof structure is of A-frame trusses.