Perimeter Wall And Attached Guard House, Magazine, Stables, Garage And Canteen

This complex comprises a perimeter wall, guard house, magazine, stables, garage, and canteen, originally built as part of infantry barracks, later a training centre, constructed between 1855 and 1858. The building materials are Plymouth limestone ashlar, rubble, and granite dressings, with English bond red brick and stone plinths, all covered by hipped slate roofs.

The layout is roughly square, featuring a guard house on the east side, a magazine flanked by stables and garages to the south, a canteen to the southwest, a forage store to the northeast, and a magazine to the northwest.

The tall perimeter wall is ashlar on the eastern entrance front and rubble on the other three sides, with capped granite piers and coping. Projecting corner bastions, covering alternate sides, incorporate rifle slits. The main entrance features a wide pediment holding a shield above a round-arched gateway with rusticated dressings and double metal doors, with smaller segmental-arched doorways on either side.

The single-story guard house has a four-window range with a deep, overhanging roof supported by six slim cast-iron columns. It has rubbed brick heads to the outer doorways and horned 6/6-pane sash windows between. A mid-20th century extension obscures part of the left-hand side. The wall to the left ramps down to enclose a small exercise yard with a doorway.

The magazine is a small brick building with gable ends, which sits behind a tall ashlar wall with a central doorway featuring a raised surround and corner piers. The stables and garages have partially open fronts with timber columns; the left side features double garage doors, while the right has metal-framed windows.

The two-story canteen has a five-window range with a symmetrical front, featuring rubbed brick flat-arches over the doorway, which has a four-pane overlight and double doors, and over the horned 6/6-pane sash windows.

The northeast corner displays an additional two-story, one-window store, likely for forage, with a wide doorway and a small 12-pane ground-floor window, and an upper taking-in door in the end gable. The northwest corner includes a similar two-story, one-window store, likely a former magazine, with steps leading to an upper doorway flanked by blind slits, and an altered doorway and first-floor casement window in the end gable.

The barracks was built to guard the nearby Bull Point ordnance yard, which was erected for the Ordnance Board between 1851 and 1855, to protect the northern approaches of Devonport Dockyard from invasion. It represents a complete and largely unaltered example of a defensible barracks from the 1840s and 1850s and is the sole surviving barracks of its type built around Devonport for dockyard defense. Comparable examples are found near Pembroke in Wales, and two survivals exist in the industrial north of England – Fulwood Barracks, Preston, and Hillsborough Barracks, Sheffield.