Exploring Kent's Past

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Monument details

Summary

Most of the original ancillary structures, comprising stores, canteens, workshops, gardens etc. stood on terraces to the west of the main steps. Included within this group of ancillery buildings was a building containaing the Guard House Privies and Magazine. This structure is still present and survives in good condition. (location accurate to the nearest 1m based on available information)

Monument Types

• MAGAZINE (Disused, Post Medieval to Modern - 1805 AD? to 1945 AD?)
• PRIVY HOUSE (Disused, Post Medieval to Modern - 1805 AD? to 1945 AD?)

Full description

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Summarised from report:

Most of the original ancillary structures, comprising stores, canteens, workshops, gardens etc. stood on terraces to the west of the main steps. Included within this group of ancillery buildings was a building containaing the Guard House Privies and Magazine. This structure is still present and survives in good condition. It is located in the south western corner of the barracks complex and is set back into the bank behind the Guard House. It is constructed in yellow stock bricks laid in English bond, with stone floors. There are five barrel vaulted cubicles, three single and two double, each entered through a tall entrance with a rubble brick lintel.

The Magazine, which contained powder for the entire barracks, is adjacent to and continuous with the Guard House Privies, separated only by a butt joint and slightly set back. It was constructed under the hillside, its rood asphalted to prevent percolating water and bomb-proofed by the earth above it. The magazine is of similar construction to the privies, in yellow stock brick laid to English bond. The entrance, in the centre elevation and now damaged, is rebated for double inward opening wooden doors. Over the entrance is a shallow segmental arch in rubbed brick with incised lines halving the bricks. There is a concrete sill to the doorway and glazed airbricks to the cavity on each side. Internally, the construction is entirely brick with glazed airbricks to the cavity. It is sub-divided into an outer Shifting Room and an inner Magazine, separated by a partition wall one stretcher thick. In both rooms there is an offset course, the former support for a raised timber floor that helped to keep munitions dry. The walls, 2.3m high above this floor, have gaps of one header arranged in vertical lines and small timber slats built into the pointing gaps: these supported a timber lining and storage racks. The whitewashed ceiling is a shallow barrel vault, 2.94m high, springing from a course of sandstone slabs on the wall tops. (1)

The earliest plan which shows the completed Napoleonic works which were undertaken at the Grand Shaft Barracks dates to 1810. (2) A later plan which dates to 1861, immediately prior to the 1860's scheme of works which were undertaken at the barracks site, gives further detail of the buildings constructed during the Napoleonic works, including lables of specific buildings. (3)

<1> RCHME, 2000, The Western Heights, Dover, Kent. Report No 4: The Grand Shaft Barracks, 19th and 20th-century infantry barracks (Unpublished document). SKE17499.

<2> Major W H Ford, Royal Engineers, 1811, Plan Shewing the Appropriation of the Ordnance Lands on the Western Heights Dover 1811 (Map). SKE51523.

<3> Unknown, 1861, Dover, General Plan of the Western Heights Barracks (Plan). SKE51541.

Sources and further reading

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