Details
TQ 9175 SW NAVAL TERRACE
Sheerness Dockyard
933/2/88
Nos 1-8 (Consecutive)
15.03.1977 Attached basement railings,
walls, coach house & stables
GV II*
Terrace of 8 officers' houses. 1824-27, by George Ledwell Taylor, architect to the Navy Board, and Sir John Rennie, engineer. Yellow stock brick with rubbed brick heads, rendered dressings, brick party wall and end gable stacks, and slate roof. Late Georgian style. Double-depth plan. EXTERIOR: 3 storeys, attic and basement; 22-window range. Terrace has a plat band and eaves cornice to a blocking course, the left-hand house has the end bay with the entrance set back; bridges cross basement areas to round-arched doorways in matching recesses with fanlights with a central round pane, and 6-panel doors, the 4 upper ones raised; the two inner blocks have paired doorways, the right-hand end house has a flat headed doorway with a 4-pane overlight. Flat-headed windows with rendered reveals have 6/6-pane sashes, 3/3-pane attic sashes. Right-hand return has 2 lateral stacks on moulded corbels, a window to the right of the door, 2 first-floor windows over it, and a single attic sash. Left-hand return flush with the dock boundary wall (qv), has a 2-window range with a lunette with a batwing fanlight to the entrance hall. Rear fenestration as the front. INTERIOR: No.1 has an entrance hall, with a good central lateral dogleg stair with cast-iron stick balusters and fluted newel, 6-panel doors and panelled shutters, and enriched cornices. SUBSIDIARY FEATURES: attached cast-iron front basement area spear-headed railings with urn finials, the curved green to the front enclosed by a dwarf retaining wall with granite coping, formerly with iron railings; attached rear garden wall extends approximately 30m to N to former coach houses and stables with hipped roof and parapet, segmental-arched coach doors with similar stable doors in raised sections. HISTORY: housed eight senior yard officers, forming a good group with the railed front garden, and the dockyard church (qqv) to the right. There was proportionately more accommodation at Sheerness than the other dockyards because of the remoteness of the site. Unlike the other Royal dockyards, Sheerness was all rebuilt at the same time. Within the little-altered SE corner of Rennie's model layout, containing the entrance, chapel and officers' accommodation, and part of a unique planned early C 19 dockyard. (Sources: Coad J: The Royal Dockyards 1690-1850: Aldershot: 1989: 54, 58, 59 ; Rennie Sir J: Sir John Rennie's Treatise on Docks and Harbours: London: 1851: 41 ; Sheerness the Dockyard, Defences and Blue Town: 1995: 1 ; Archaeologia Cantiana: Harris T: Government and Urban Development in Kent -the case of the Royal: 245-276).
Listing NGR: TQ9147475086
