Command House And Attached Entrance Railings, Stable And Carriage House And Rear Wall

Command House and attached entrance railings, stable and carriage house, and rear wall

This is a storekeeper's house and officer housing, now a public house, dating to around 1719 with late 20th-century alterations. The building is constructed in red Flemish bond brick with stone dressings, gable stacks, and an old tile valley roof, with hipped roofs to outer blocks all behind brick parapets. It is built in Queen Anne style.

The main structure consists of two storeys over a raised basement with a double-depth plan. The exterior features a main range of five window bays with flanking two-storey, single-window bay wings. The symmetrical front elevation has a raised basement, string band, cornice and parapet. A wide central flight of steps rises to the central first floor, fitted with curtails, wrought-iron railings and column newels. The doorcase has fluted Doric pilasters, triglyph frieze and projecting modillion cornice, with an eight-panelled door featuring panelled reveals and soffit.

The windows are gauged brick segmental arched openings with 6/6-pane sashes. Those on the first floor are original, while the second floor replacements feature horns. The flanking wings continue the cornices from the main range and have wide tripartite windows with central 6/6-pane sashes and 2/2-pane sashes to the ground and first floors, all under gauged brick arches. The return elevations feature ground and first floor 6/6-pane sashes under similar arches. The coped gables display two 6/6-pane attic sashes beneath an open lunette to the valley, with a wide stack.

The five-window rear section includes a large central round-arched stair window. To the south is an attached stable and carriage house range with two wide segmental-arched openings at ground floor. The first floor has a plat band and central shortened 3/3-pane sash with flanking sunken panels; the gable end is rendered.

The basement retains some original brick groin vaulting and stone flag floor. The interior has otherwise been altered in the late 20th century for public house use. The stable range has a late 19th-century queen post roof.

Attached to the building is a rear brick wall extending approximately 30 metres from the south-west corner.

The building was originally constructed as the Storekeeper's House and offices for Chatham Gun Wharf, which occupies the site of medieval wharves below the medieval church of St Mary (rebuilt 1884-7 by Sir A Blomfield). This was the site of the first Royal dockyard in the 16th century. When the dockyard relocated to a larger site in the 17th century, the area passed to the Board of Ordnance for use as the Gun Wharf, functioning as an arsenal and dock combined. The storekeeper's house first appears on a 1719 map of the site. By 1863, the building was identified as the Senior Ordnance Store Officer's Quarters. An enormous Gun Carriage Store extended from the south wall of the coach house, now demolished. In the late 19th century, the building housed the commissary and the Commissary General Office. It was converted to public house use in 1978.

The building holds group value with the Grade II former Gun Wharf ordnance building to the south, the Grade II Church of St Mary, and the Chatham Lines, a Scheduled Monument. It is listed as a fine and externally unaltered early 18th-century house with additional historic interest as the earliest surviving building from the Chatham Gun Wharf.