1-9 Speckled Wood

1-9 Speckled Wood, Ore, Hastings

This building comprises the surviving part of a workhouse designed by Sampson Kempthorne in 1835, with working plans probably drawn up by his agent Annesley Voysey. The building was later converted into a hospital and subsequently into nine residential units in 2010.

The structure is built of brick in English bond with stucco applied to the ground floor of the entrance block. It has slate roofs and is fenestrated with sash windows. The original windows were twelve-pane sashes, but most have been replaced within their original openings by sashes with vertical glazing bars or without glazing bars.

The former entrance block features a low-pitched hipped roof with wide eaves and an end chimneystack. It comprises three storeys arranged in a 1:3:1 window pattern, with the central three bays projecting slightly. The windows have flat brick arches and sill bands, and the second-floor windows are blind. The ground floor has a wide central doorway with a rectangular fanlight and a cornice on console brackets. Contemporary three-storey wings are attached to the north and west, and to the south-west is a two-storey range.

Kempthorne designed ten square-plan workhouses between 1835 and 1837. Hastings and Eton are known to have followed the model most completely, though Eton is thought to survive only in fragmentary form. Square-plan workhouses typically had four ranges arranged around a square perimeter, with central ranges arranged in a cruciform plan.

About half of the three-storey cruciform parts survive here, along with less than an eighth of the two-storey square ranges. The surviving elements comprise the south entrance block (which contained a waiting room on the ground floor and a board room above), the south wing (which included the boys' and girls' school, dining room, and women's infirmary), the central octagonal structure (with the master's parlour on the ground floor and master's bedroom above), the western wing (comprising women's day rooms on the ground floor with women's infirmary and bedrooms above), and the south-west two-storey workroom and washing room. The original extent of the 1830s building is documented on the 1872 Ordnance Survey map.