Entrance Gates, Piers And Walls To South Of Officers Mess

STANTON ST QUINTIN

1384/0/10025 HULLAVINGTON BARRACKS 01-DEC-05 Entrance gates, piers and walls to sou th of Officers' Mess

GV II Gates, piers and boundary wall. 1935-6. A Bulloch, architectural advisor to the Air Ministry's Directorate of Works and Buildings. Bath stone ashlar on dry-stone walling, cast and wrought iron.

PLAN: A pair of vehicle gates and single pedestrian gate, set to piers, and flanked by convex crescents of low walls set-back from minor road. The gates are centred to the main entrance to the Officers' Mess.

ELEVATION: A pair of decorative gates plus a single gate. These hung to plain square stone piers with a square-edged thin coping carrying tall concave pyramidal cappings with wrought iron lamps. To each side a short straight section of dry-stone wall returned forward in broad convex sweeps to the roadside; walls have a flat weathered coping, swept up at the junction with piers.

HISTORY: A distinguished ensemble framing the separate entrance for officers to the base. Hullavington, which opened on June 6th 1937 as a Flying Training Station, is in every respect the key station most strongly representative of the improved architectural quality characteristic of the air bases developed under the post-1934 expansion of the RAF. Its position in the west of England with other training and maintenance bases also prompted its selection in 1938 as one of series of Aircraft Storage Units for the storage of vital reserves destined for the operational front-line. For further details on the site, see Buildings 59, 60 and 61 (The Officers' Mess).