Former Weedon Barracks, Storehouse Number 2

FORMER WEEDON BARRACKS, STOREHOUSE NUMBER 2

A warehouse built between 1804 and 1810 as part of the Weedon Bec military complex, one of an even-numbered group positioned to the south side of the Grand Union Canal. The building was internally remodelled in 1889 following a fire, with drawings of this work held in the Royal Engineers Library.

The structure is constructed in Flemish bond red brick with gauged brick dressings to the arches. The roof is slate, hipped, replacing an original M-shaped Welsh roof. The building is rectangular in plan with a central vestibule containing stairs that open into flanking storerooms.

The north elevation, which faces the canal, is a two-storey, 11-window range. Central doors consist of 12-panel double-leaf doors flanked by stone pilasters and supporting a Doric entablature with cambered arches. Above these are tripartite sash windows. Similar, but wider, blocked doorways are positioned at either end, each with comparable windows above. Ground-floor semi-circular arched windows contain 2-light wooden casements of late 19th-century date, set within semi-circular arched recesses. The first floor has late 19th-century horned 6/6-pane sashes. The centre and ends of the elevation project slightly. A plinth and first-floor string course run across the facade, which terminates in a brick parapet.

The south elevation is similar in character but exploits the fall of the land to accommodate a basement storey. This basement level is treated in a robust classical manner, featuring grey sandstone vermiculated rustication and semi-circular arches over original nail-studded plank doors with louvred tympanae above. The centre bay projects and is fitted with iron railings opening towards the central loading area. Short sections of retaining wall with rising steps to the canal basin area flank either end.

Internally, the basement contains brick tunnel vaults to each bay. The first floor is supported by three rows of stop-chamfered timber posts with pillow beams. The warehouse retains a number of original features including panelled double-leaf doors, although the staircase has been removed. The 1889 alterations introduced metal roof trusses and iron columns supporting jack arches in the right-hand section, as well as a stone staircase with iron balustrade. Semi-circular arched doorways set in semi-circular arched recesses provide access to the storerooms.

The Storehouse and Magazine group at Weedon Bec was planned and built during the Napoleonic Wars as a unique planned military-industrial complex, complete with its own defensible transport system and surrounding walls. The location next to the Grand Union Canal made it the ideal choice in 1802 for a central ammunition depot, as it was close to the small arms factories and workshops of Birmingham whilst remaining distant from vulnerable coastal areas and other ordnance yards sited near the royal naval dockyards. The original plans to build a small arms factory were abandoned, and instead Weedon became the first inland depot of the Board of Ordnance. By 1807 it was supplying armaments for the expeditionary force bound for the Netherlands.

From 1837 the storehouses were used as barracks and as a prison, with numbers 5 and 7 being converted for the latter purpose. From 1855 the buildings served as a clothing store. During the 1870s the site was converted into one of the Depots created under the army reforms of Edward Cardwell, Secretary of State for War, and from 1885 functioned as a weapons and equipment store. A large Clothing Store was constructed during the Boer War of 1899-1902, after which the site retained an important role in dispatch of small arms and clothes by rail. Following closure in 1965, it was used as a government supply store.

The original planning of Weedon Bec's major first phase from 1804 to 1816 comprised four functionally separate sites: the Storehouse Enclosure, the Magazine Compound, the Barracks (now demolished), and housing for the Depot's principal officials known as the Pavilion (also demolished). The latter groups were built on high ground to the north, close to the Daventry-London road, and were designed to complement and enhance the effect of the storehouse and magazine groups set on lower ground to the south. What survives comprises a unique planned military-industrial complex complete with its own defensible transport system and perimeter walls. The canal widens into a large central basin flanked by pedestrian bridges within the Storehouse Enclosure. Gatehouses at the west and east ends were equipped with winding gear for operating portcullis gates providing further defensive measures. Casemates are formed in the angles of the walls, which are topped by bomb-proof layers of sand and gravel capped with brick and a stone-flag walkway, accessed by ramps with stone-paved stairs and runways for deployment of small artillery pieces. The Magazine Compound was separated from the Storehouse Enclosure by an open area exceeding 200 metres as protection against explosion, and was extended westwards by an additional magazine and earthen traverse around 1857.

The storehouses, which principally housed muskets, guns and their carriages, are comparable in their consistently high treatment as a planned group to those found in late 18th-century naval dockyards, notably at Portsmouth and Chatham, and to the finest set-pieces of early 19th-century civil dock warehousing, such as John Foster's Goree Warehouses of 1810 in Liverpool's George's Dock and Telford and Hardwick's work for the St Katherine Docks Company in London. This quality treatment, particularly marked on the south elevations with their rusticated basements, is repeated internally, where even the heavy axial beams have had their supporting posts chamfered with scrolled stops. The magazines, built to the distinctive British double-vaulted plan, are smaller in individual scale than other contemporary examples, but as a group they had no rival until the suite of traversed magazines were built at Bull Point, Plymouth, in the 1850s. The catenary arches used here were first employed at Tipner in the 1790s and then at Colonel D'Arcy's magazine at Upnor. The use of traverses makes the group highly innovatory in its planning, with blast walls of earth, sometimes faced in brick, becoming henceforth a characteristic feature of magazine complexes. These traverses have also uniquely assumed an architectural form.

As a unique planned military-industrial complex complete with its own defensible transport system and surrounding walls, the national importance of the Storehouse and Magazine group at Weedon Bec is further enhanced by their intended role within the context of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.