Former Royal Naval Hospital The Quadrangle Centre

Former Royal Naval Hospital: The Quadrangle Centre

This complex occupies the site of a former Naval Hospital in Stonehouse, Plymouth. Built between 1758 and 1762 by Alexander Rovehead, probably with William Robinson as consultant architect, for the Navy Board, it was converted to housing in the mid-1990s.

The buildings are constructed from Plymouth limestone rubble with limestone dressings including rusticated quoins, bands above the ground floor, first-floor strings and plain architraves. The roofs are concrete tile hipped designs (two parallel roofs per block) behind coped rubble parapets with bands. Truncated lateral stacks are visible in the roof spaces.

The plan comprises ten semi-detached ward blocks arranged around a courtyard that opens to the west. The blocks on the north and south sides are each separated by two smaller blocks with subsidiary functions. A central east block housed the chapel, dispensary and some staff accommodation. These buildings are connected by a Tuscan colonnade on the inner side of the courtyard.

The complex is three storeys high, with single-storey passages, some heightened to two storeys. The central block presents a symmetrical 1:3:1-bay front on both front and rear elevations. The central bays are broken forward and surmounted by a pediment with an oculus. Above the roof sits a lead-roofed cupola with an open round-arched arcade. The outer elevation features mullioned windows to the central section, tall Venetian windows to the first floor and low Venetian windows to the ground floor flanking a doorway with sidelights in similar style. Most windows have old hornless or later horned sashes with glazing bars. The courtyard front displays a central pediment with a tripartite lunette over a tripartite window above a round-arched tripartite window. The other blocks are simpler in design, without breaks, pediments, lunettes or Venetian windows. One block to the north of the west entrance was left as a ruin following bomb damage in World War II; another to the north was demolished. The colonnade has granite Tuscan columns, partly infilled with twentieth-century glazing and early twentieth-century upper floors.

Inspected blocks typically feature a cantilevered granite staircase, teak floors to wards and pine floors to attics with original king-post roof structure.

The hospital's design, with detached blocks arranged around a central courtyard, was conceived to prevent the spread of infection. It accommodated 1,200 patients in 60 wards, with wards placed either side of a spine wall in each block. The design was much praised in the eighteenth century, being illustrated and described in John Howard's The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1784). It influenced French hospital planning following a visit by Coulomb and Tenon in 1787. French hospital plans were subsequently adapted as the pavilion plan and advocated by Florence Nightingale from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

The ward quadrangle forms the centrepiece of an extensive example of Neo-Classical institutional planning, with the axis continuing through officers' houses arranged around the Square to the east. This complex is of outstanding historical significance in the development of institutions for the care of the sick and forms the principal part of a remarkable and complete military hospital complex.