Listing Text

SU 06 SW ROUNDWAY LONDON ROAD
(South East side)

1383/5/209 Former Keep and attached wall and gateway, Le 03.04.1987 Marchant barracks

II

Armoury, guard house and store, now part warehouse. Dated 1878, designed at the War Office by Major HC Seddon RE. Red brick with limestone and stone dressings; lateral stacks and asphalt roof. Fortress Gothic Revival style.
PLAN: square, with ground-floor guard room and detention cells, corner stairs, stores on the upper floors.
EXTERIOR: 4 storeys; 5-window range. A regular, square block with opposite square stair towers rising above the roof, other two corners chamfered, with raised parapets, stone sill and lintel bands, dentil eaves and crenellated parapet. Battered ground floor to a weathered band, narrow metal-framed windows with stone lintels, stepped in threes to the stair tower. A glazed iron verandah over the entrance to the former guard room. To the rear is a double door formerly for the barracks fire engine.
INTERIOR: not inspected, but noted as having a fire-proof frame of iron columns to jack arches, stone open-well stairs, and a standard layout of stores and other rooms.
SUBSIDIARY FEATURES: attached wicket gateway with an iron gate, and one of originally two gate piers forming the main entrance to the barracks.
HISTORY: the Keep was a secure armoury, store, guard house and lock-up, and the characteristic building of the Localisation depots. These were part of the Cardwell reforms, which redistributed barracks around the country to encourage local connections and assist recruitment. As such, the Keep raised the local profile of the barracks, and provided an emblematic focus for the local Wiltshire regiment, whose home this was from 1878 until 1967. With the similar version at Reading, one of only ten surviving examples of this important symbolic building.
(Watson Colonel Sir HM: History of the Corps of Royal Engineers: Chatham: 1954-: 157-160).

Listing NGR: SU0186862505