Slaughterhouse And Attached Yard Wall, Royal William Victualling Yard

The slaughterhouse and attached yard wall, now used as stores, were built between 1830 and 1831 by Sir John Rennie Jnr for the Victualling Board, with later stores added around 1885. The building is constructed of limestone ashlar with granite dressings and a slate hipped roof, and is in a late Georgian style.

The building has a triangular plan arranged around a yard, which previously contained cattle pens against the north-east perimeter wall. There is a slaughterhouse to the south-west and an office to the north. The principal front forms part of the Yard entrance, paired with the facing Police House, and features an eight-bay Doric colonnade with an entablature and parapet in front of a recessed limestone wall containing a doorway. A 20th-century office now occupies the south-west bay. The south-west end features a projecting slaughterhouse gable with banded pilaster strips and scrolled brackets, beneath a cornice and pedimented bellcote that contains a late 19th-century brass bell and wheel within a round-arched opening. Three round-arched doorways with small-paned metal fanlights are present, the central one with a rusticated surround and a four-panel flush door; the outer doorways are blind with rusticated jambs. The long south-west return has a granite plinth, cornice, and parapet, articulated by a round-arched arcade with small-paned metal lunettes, and two doorways with double doors. The north end has a single window. The north-east external wall is blind, constructed of rubble with an ashlar band, rising from the Dockyard Wall; a blocked doorway with an ashlar surround is at the north end, while a similar doorway to the south was formerly the cattle entrance. The courtyard elevations have round-arched arcades with 20th-century metal-framed windows, and a formerly open arcade of iron columns with flanged capitals to the old cattle lairs against the outer wall, now also glazed. The slaughterhouse roof has a ridge lantern. The yard is paved and drained.

The interior contains a king post roof. Originally, live animals entered the slaughterhouse through an entrance set back from the Main Gate. While fewer original fittings survive than at the slaughterhouse in Gosport, the building remains within a more complete complex of victualling buildings. The slaughterhouse forms part of an important group with the Main Gate and the matching Police Buildings across the Yard, creating a formal entrance to the site. The Yard is one of the most remarkable and complete early 19th-century industrial complexes in the country, and a unique English example of Neo-Classical planning for a state manufacturing site.