Hospital At Britannia Royal Naval College

Hospital at Britannia Royal Naval College

A sanatorium built between 1899 and 1905 for the Britannia Royal Naval College by Sir Aston Webb, who later designed the main college buildings. The hospital is constructed in Flemish-bond brick with Portland stone dressings and features slate roofs. The chimneys have stone-banded shafts, some connected by round-headed recesses. The style is Free Palladian with some Regency detailing applied to the ward blocks, administration block, and doctor's house.

The building is arranged on a plan of three parallel detached isolation ward wings connected by covered colonnades, with a fourth administrative block positioned slightly to the north. One of the colonnades incorporates a glazed first-floor corridor, and a slender Venetian-style water tower stands at the end of one wing, featuring a peaked lead roof with eaves brackets, clasping pilasters with bands of stone, and three tiers of narrow windows on the north-west side together with three stone slit windows on each side at the top beneath the cornice.

The ward wings present austere south-east fronts designed to provide balconies for convalescent patients. Each wing displays a three-window façade with the ground floor set high above ground level owing to the slope of the land. The centre bay projects forward beneath a pedimented gable and is pierced at ground and first-floor levels to create two tiers of recessed balconies. The upper balcony features a moulded round-headed stone arch springing from the parapet; the lower balcony is divided into three bays by square-section stone piers with moulded capitals and bases, with matching responds. The upper balcony contains a small-pane segmental-headed timber window serving the ward, while the lower has a square-headed window. The outer bays are short projections probably containing stairs, roofed at right angles, with first-floor oculi featuring keyblocks and ground-floor windows set into open recesses flanking the ground-floor balcony. The nine-bay return walls display deep boarded eaves, small-pane timber sashes with some transoms, and chimney shafts with convex shoulders. The ward wings are linked by colonnades at their north-west ends, featuring substantial cast-iron columns with moulded bases and capitals.

The administration block has a symmetrical three-bay-one-bay-three-bay front with deep eaves and a moulded eaves cornice with brackets. Two-storey bows stand to the left and right, with a central porch formed by a flat roof on Tuscan columns positioned between them. The entrance is a round-headed doorway flanked by side lights. Most windows retain original small-pane timber sashes, though some have been replaced. The doctor's house, positioned at right angles at the south end of the administrative wing, displays similar treatment to the ward wings' south-east fronts but features canted bays to left and right.

The interior has not been formally inspected but is considered likely to be of interest. Pevsner records the presence of a chapel and a bronze bust of George V (when Prince of Wales) dated 1908, executed by the sculptor Hamo Thorneycroft.

The design appears to have been influenced by the Royal Naval Hospital at Stonehouse, Plymouth, completed in 1787 by Alexander Rowehead, which was the earliest example in Europe of a hospital built on a pavilion plan with ward blocks separated by colonnades to prevent the spread of disease. The college was established following the positioning of HMS Britannia as a training ship for naval cadets in the River Dart in 1863, joined by HMS Hindustan in 1865. By 1875 the Admiralty had decided to construct a land-based college at Dartmouth, though the necessary land was not acquired until 1896. Construction of terraces for the main building commenced in 1898, but when two cadets died of influenza aboard HMS Britannia, the sanatorium was constructed before the remainder of the college.