Former Royal Dockyard Church And Attached Wall And Railings

TQ 9175 SW GARRISON ROAD Sheerness Dockyard 933/2/87 Former Royal Dockyard Church and attached wall 07.12.1966 And railings

GV II*

Dockyard church, community centre, now disused. 1828, by George Ledwell Taylor, architect for the Navy Board, and Sir John Rennie Snr, engineer; rebuilt with the former clock tower after a fire in 1884, used as squash court late C20. Yellow stock brick and sandstone ashlar dressings, brick lateral stacks and slate roof. Neo-classical style. Rectangular plan. EXTERIOR: E end has a large central Venetian window with panelled architrave flanked by paired pilasters beneath lateral stacks, with narrow outer bays containing single segmental-arched and taller upper round-arched windows. These windows extend along 7 -bay N and S sides with a first-floor cill band, the end bays separated bya pilaster and containing doorways with double doors. The imposing W front has a full-height pedimented tetra style Ionic portico, the outer bays with windows as the sides, a large central doorway with smaller ones each side with double doors each with 6 raised panels, architraves, pulvinated friezes and cornices, beneath round-arched upper windows. The 1828 clock tower is square with banded rustication and a clock face to the lower stage beneath a cornice, paired pilasters to the upper bellcote stage with round-arched louvred windows, and a cornice and iron railings. All windows blocked at time of inspection. INTERIOR not inspected; but recorded as having had a gallery on three sides on square, panelled supports, panelled front, and fluted upper columns to a roof with segmental-arched central section, and W narthex. Most of the fittings reported to have been removed in conversion to squash court. SUBSIDIARY FEATURES: curved lawn to front surrounded by an attached dwarf retaining wall with granite coping, and remaining sections of cast-iron spear-headed railings, gate piers and lamp brackets. HISTORY: externally the most impressive of the three surviving royal dockyard chapels, and still in its original setting with the officers' Naval Terrace (qv), though altered internally. Unlike the other royal dockyards, Sheerness was all rebuilt at the same time. The church lies within the little-altered SE corner of Rennie's model layout, which also contains the entrance and officers' accommodation, and forms part of a unique planned early C19 dockyard. (Sources: Coad J: The Royal Dockyards 1690-1850: Aldershot: 1989: 74; Rennie Sir J: Sir John Rennie's Treatise on Docks and Harbours: London: 1851:41; Sheerness the Dockyard, Defences and Blue Town: 1995:1).

Listing NGR: TQ9146175154