Gatehouse to Le Marchant Barracks with gate piers

This is an armoury, guard house, and store, now partially a warehouse, dating to 1878. It was designed by Major HC Seddon RE for the War Office. The building is constructed of red brick laid in English Bond, with limestone and stone dressings, lateral stacks, and an asphalt roof. It is built in a Fortress Gothic Revival style.

The building is square in plan, with a ground-floor guard room and detention cells, corner stairs, and stores on the upper floors. The exterior is four storeys high and has a five-window range. It is a regular, square block with square stair towers rising above the roof, featuring corbel tables and machicolation; two corners are chamfered, with raised parapets, stone sill and lintel bands, dentil eaves and a crenellated parapet. The ground floor is battered up to a weathered band, and contains narrow metal-framed windows with stone lintels, stepped in threes to the stair towers. A glazed iron verandah is above the former guard room entrance. A double door to the rear was formerly for the barracks fire engine.

The interior, which was not inspected, is noted to have a fire-proof frame of iron columns to jack arches, stone open-well stairs, and a standard layout of stores and other rooms.

Attached to the building is a wicket gateway with an iron gate, and one of the original two gate piers which formed the main entrance to the barracks.

This Keep was a secure armoury, store, guard house and lock-up, characteristic of the Localisation depots. These depots were part of the Cardwell reforms, designed to redistribute barracks and encourage local connections and assist recruitment. The Keep raised the local profile of the barracks and provided an emblematic focus for the Wiltshire regiment, which was based there from 1878 until 1967. It is one of only ten surviving examples of this important symbolic building, similar to the structure at Reading. It features stop-chamfered spine beams with run-out stops.