Former Officers Terrace And Attached Front Area Walls And Overthrows

Former Officers' Terrace and Attached Front Area Walls and Overthrows

A terrace of 12 houses built between 1722 and 1731 at Chatham Dockyard, probably designed in-house by the Navy Board. The building is constructed in brick with a stucco basement, stone dressings, party wall stacks and a slate hipped roof.

The terrace is arranged on a slope with a double-depth plan and rear service wings enclosing flagged yards. Each house has basement offices entered from the front, with family and staff access from the rear. The façade comprises three storeys, a basement and an attic. The houses vary between a 4-window range and a 3-window range, with the latter set back. The composition is symmetrical, with end and central pairs of houses set forward and slightly raised, divided by paired pilasters to round-arched gablets. A plat band and cornice run across, with a crenellated parapet featuring gabled merlons.

Each house has a timber Doric porch with clasping pilasters supporting a triglyph frieze and modillion cornice. The doors are 6-panel with flush panels, accompanied by 6-pane side windows. The porches are positioned asymmetrically to each house: the middle pair set back one bay from the centre, the outer ones one bay from the outer bays, and the intervening sections in the inner bays. Windows throughout have segmental arches with late 19th-century 2-light horned sashes.

The rear features a mews range of rendered 2-storey blocks connected by single-storey entrance blocks. These contain round-arched doorways with fluted stone fanlights, ground-floor windows with labels, and segmental-arched first-floor windows. Good dated lead hoppers and downpipes are set in re-entrants.

Interiors vary between houses. Number 6 contains a basement room with curved corner double doors opening to a fine open well stair with column-on-vase balusters, fluted column newels and ramped, wreathed rails. The recessed houses have plain stairs from the front entrance with turned balusters. Throughout the terrace are wainscotting, dado rails, reeded cornices and plain fire surrounds, with a continuous attic running along the length.

The front area walls are attached to the terrace and feature two wrought-iron overthrow arches with lamps to the front steps descending to Medway Gardens.

Each officer allotted a house conducted his business from the basement, with the porch reportedly used by sedan chair porters to transport the officer around the Dockyard. Each house has an enclosed garden and stabling forming a parallel rear terrace. The terrace represents the most ambitious post-1716 development on the hillside north of the yard, and is comparable in character to work associated with the Ordnance Board at the Arsenal, Berwick-on-Tweed, Devonport and elsewhere of this period. As a unified palace front, it ranks as one of the most advanced terrace designs for its date outside London, and is the finest surviving example in a Navy yard, the 1690 terrace at Plymouth having been partially destroyed by bombing circa 1941.