Police Station

Details

786/0/10173 MARKET STREET 01-MAR-07 29-33 Police Station

GV II Police Station. 1910 by John Dixon Butler, FRIBA, Architect and Surveyor to the Metropolitan Police, with later-C20 modernisation internally. Red brick with ashlar dressings. Slate mansard and pitched roofs. Timber sashes with horns, refurbished in early-C21. Restrained Queen Anne style.

EXTERIOR: To Market Street, a wide and largely symmetrical frontage is of sixteen windows bays, organised into a five parts, with a steep gable with stone copings marking the end and central sections, between which are second floor dropped slated mansard roofs over a dentillated cornice. The ground floor has a deep ashlar band, the pedestrian entrance to the right hand side has an advanced ashlar entrance with 'police' inscribed in the frieze below the prominent cornice, and to the right an ashlar canted bay. Pair of front doors of panelled hard wood, and the stone architrave carries the 1910 date. There is a carriage entrance to the left side, this and the ground floor tripartite windows are under inset segmental arches. The carriage entrance is lined with glazed bricks, white above a brown dado. The first floor windows have exaggerated slender stone keyblocks. Rear elevation has irregular window arrangement, these under gauged brick arches, and a single storey flat-roofed extension. To the rear is a projecting cell block wing with gauged red brick arches over the sash windows; seven small cell windows, placed high, one replaced with taller window, these with small pane iron frames, chamfered stone heads and stone cills. Boundary wall to yard survives in part, but the former stable buildings to rear have been substantially rebuilt.

INTERIOR: The entrance hall and office were modernised in the late-C20, and there are later partitions and fittings elsewhere in the offices as part of this campaign. Full height with metal balusters. Some arched openings in the corridors. Of note is the interior in the rear wing where the cells survive; here there are thick metal cell doors with large locks and sliding window. Systems for secure operation of light and toilet flush survive.

HISTORY: Woolwich Police Station was built in 1910 by John Dixon Butler, Architect and Surveyor to the Metropolitan Police. Dixon Butler, FRIBA, succeeded his father, John Butler, in this post in 1895 and served as Surveyor until his death in 1920, by which time he had designed over 200 police stations and courts.

SUBSIDIARY: Attached iron railings around the front area and up two sets of steps. Police lantern with blue glass is set on a chamfered stone plinth to left of the steps.

SOURCES: Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner. Buildings of England 2: South. p.282. A. Stuart Gray. Edwardian Architecture. p.132

SUMMARY OF IMPORTANCE Edwardian police station designed 1910 by John Dixon Butler, Architect and Surveyor to the Metropolitan Police, with a restrained Queen Anne façade. The building has undergone some internal modernisation, as is often the case, but it retains mostly intact set of cells in the rear wing. There is particularly strong group value with the listed new Town Hall of 1903-6 and the 1912 Magistrates Court, also by Dixon Butler, which it directly faces. Together these buildings reflect the prowess of Woolwich Metropolitan Borough, created in 1899, that provided a number of new buildings in this period to assert the new borough's civic pride. The building has further group value with the adjacent listed cottages on Market Street.

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

493809

Legacy System:

LBS

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