Former GWR works entrance, pedestrian subway and former carriage trimming shop

Former GWR Works Entrance, Pedestrian Subway and Former Carriage Trimming Shop

This is the entrance building to the former Great Western Railway engineering works, constructed between 1870 and 1872. It comprises a two-storey works entrance building on the south elevation fronting Emlyn Square, a pedestrian subway tunnel running beneath the railway line, and a former carriage trimming shop located on the upper level.

The building is constructed of rock-faced snecked Foxwood stone with Bath stone ashlar quoins and dressings, with slate roofs.

The Works Entrance Building

The main elevation faces south onto Emlyn Square and is seven bays wide. The central bay provides access to the subway tunnel, which runs north-south beneath the railway from Emlyn Square in the south to the former GWR works in the north. The central three bays are brought forward and quoined, with the ground floor set on a splay. A continuous ashlar string runs across all seven bays at ground-floor level.

The ground floor of the central bay features a round-arched tunnel entrance with panelled, square-headed double doors and a multi-paned overdoor light. The flanking office bays have four-panel round-arched pedestrian doors, all with hood moulds. A keystone with a lamp bracket sits above the tunnel entrance. The first floor of the central bays contains paired six-over-six sashes separated by a stone mullion. The side bays have round-headed sash windows under hood moulds at ground level, and two eight-over-eight sashes at first-floor level. A gable rises over all seven bays, topped by an unmoulded ashlar cornice with a keyed oculus in the apex.

The rear of the building, positioned on higher ground, consists of a single-storey workshop with a broad gable facing north, clad in timber. This section has late twentieth-century window and door openings to the ground floor.

The west side is bounded by the remains of the original dividing wall between the trimming shop and the adjacent sawmills (later a carriage shop), now demolished. This wall features a wide doorway with twentieth-century doors and two windows with eight-over-eight sashes under plain lintels. A segmental arched opening, now bricked up, is visible in the section of wall extending beyond the north end of the workshop.

Interior

The offices flanking the entrance tunnel retain their cast-iron columns and late-twentieth-century partitioning. The western office preserves an internal wall with small round-arched openings from the period of original construction. Both offices have late-twentieth-century glazed openings to the tunnel.

The pedestrian subway tunnel extends approximately 116 metres in length, 4.6 metres in width and 2.1 metres in height. The southern section beneath the trimming shop features visible cast-iron GWR columns with iron beams spanning between them, and late-twentieth-century plastered walls with glazed entrances to the flanking offices. The remainder of the tunnel has red brick walls with engineering brick dressings, roofed by brick jack-arches springing from cast-iron columns set along its length. The northern section is roofed in concrete. Early twenty-first-century metal bollards are positioned at both tunnel entrances. The subterranean structure of the subway tunnel north of the entrance building and trimming shop is included in the listing; the above-ground surfaces and structures above the tunnel are excluded.

The former trimming shop contains regular cast-iron columns and iron roof trusses.