South Block And Attached Front Basement Area Railings, Brompton Barracks

TQ 7669 SW GILLINGHAM PASLEY ROAD (West side), Brompton 3/36 South block and attached front basement area railings,Brompton Barracks

GV II*

Formerly known as: West Privates Range, New Royal Artillery Barracks, Chatham Lines PASLEY ROAD. Artillery, later Engineers'barracks. 1804-6, by James Wyatt, Surveyor to the Office of Works, and Lt.-Colonel R D'Arcy RE, for the Board of Ordnance. Brick with limestone ashlar dressings and slate roof, hipped to the pavilions. Late Georgian style. PLAN: axial plan of back-to-back barrack rooms with transverse stair corridors, with end rear wings. EXTERIOR,: 2 storeys and basement; 1:14:5:14.1-bay range. A symmetrical front has matching 16-bay ranges with 3-storey end pavilions, connected by a central 3-bay ashlar entrance section with giant distyle in antis Tuscan colunms to an entablature and balustrade; a rusticated wall behind has round-arched ground-floor doorway with radial fanlight and double doors and 6/6-pane sashes each side, and first-floor flat-headed 6/6-pane sashes. Pavilions have an ashlar first-floor band, tripartite ground-floor windows in segmental-arched recesses, first-floor 6/6 and second-floor 313-pane sashes; intervening sections have rectangular rusticated ashlar surrounds 4 bays from each end to round-arched doorways with radial fanlights and panelled doors. End 1:5:1 -window return wings have end pavilions as the front, and round-arched outer and central doorways. INTERIOR: altered mid C20. SUBSIDIARY FEATURES: attached cast-iron railings extend along front basement areas between inner and end pavilions and to end returns. HISTORY: To the rear were stables for 200 horses. Part of a quadrangular group with the North and Officer's blocks on an axis with the War memorials and Institute (qqv). Shares a compositional system with Wyatt's other large Artillery barracks, at Woolwich which gives it a Palladian air of monumentality. One of the largest and most impressive examples of military architecture in the country. (General Plan: 1806-: PPO, W078 2649).