New Building, Royal Military Academy

Officers' training college, mess and barracks at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, built between 1911 and 1918 by HB Measures, Director of Barrack Construction.

The building is constructed in Bath stone ashlar and brick with stone dressings, brick axial stacks with cornices, and a slate hipped roof. It follows an axial plan with outer H-shaped cadet blocks angled forward and linked by passages to a central single-depth officers' mess with a rear canteen.

The design employs the Edwardian Baroque style. The exterior presents a very long and strongly articulated group comprising a left-hand three-storey range of 6, 22 and 7 windows, a central two-storey range of seven windows with a four-stage tower, and a right-hand three-storey range of 7, 22 and 6 windows, all connected by single-storey seven-window corridors. The ground floors feature banded ashlar, with mullion and transom metal-framed windows and 6/6 pane sashes throughout.

The central block contains a tower with a semi-circular distyle in antis Tuscan porch with half-domed roof to double half-glazed doors. Above this is a first-floor round-arched window with Tuscan columns to the impost band, all contained within a two-storey aedicule with paired first-floor Ionic columns rising from a full-height ground floor plinth. A modillion pediment crowns this section, containing the royal coat of arms. The top section has trophy bases to octagonal clasping buttresses, a modillion cornice forming a segmental pediment over a clock within an ashlar panel, and a hexagonal dome with flagpole and arched buttresses to corner octagonal pinnacles. A swan's neck pediment tops a niche on Ionic columns.

The flanking sections have giant pilaster strips to the balustrade with pedimented dies and outer finials. They feature segmental-arched ground floor and round-arched first floor three-light windows, with shallow curved balconies fitted with turned balusters and brackets from the key beneath.

The outer blocks display round-arched ground floor mullion windows and flat-headed upper 6/6-pane sashes with architraves and first-floor cornices. Projecting outer wings are divided into three sections by pilaster strips to the modillion cornice, with pedimented three-bay centres containing keyed oculi and open pediments over the three middle first-floor windows. The middle entrance range has a similarly pedimented central section with open ground floor arches and a central first-floor pedimented niche. End three-window sections are set forward with clasping pilaster strips. Central and outer end pedimented sections employ a perspective effect, having one window to the outer side and two to the inner side of the pediment. The ashlar linking corridors have central entrances with bracketed segmental-arched canopies to double doors and keyed lunettes to outer bays separated by pilaster strips. End returns feature banded ashlar ground floors above brick basements, with projecting end and central pedimented sections. The plain brick rear elevation is visible. The canteen has six rear gables and gabled ends with wide lunette mullion windows.

The interior contains coloured tiled wainscotting in the main sections. The officers' mess features a two-storey entrance stair hall with brown tiling and an open-well stair with turned balusters and newel rising across the entrance, flanked by a left-hand dining room and right-hand drawing room. The rear canteen has red tiles and Ionic columns supporting a barrel-vaulted roof. The cadets' accommodation is plainly finished.

This building forms part of the early twentieth-century expansion of the Academy and is similarly styled to the gymnasium also on the site. It represents a striking and richly decorated composition in which the great size of the buildings is handled with considerable skill, and stands as one of the most important manifestations of the British Army at the height of its imperial dominion.