Building 31 (Officers Mess and Quarters) England, UK

Listed Building Description

Text courtesy of Historic England. © Crown Copyright, reprinted under the Open Government License.

CATTERICK

1871/0/10003 MARNE BARRACKS (FORMER RAF CATTERICK) 01-DEC-05 Building 31 (Officers' Mess and Quarte rs)

GV II Officers' Mess with accommodation. 1935. By A Bulloch, architectural advisor to the Air Ministry's Directorate of Works and Buildings. Drawing Nos 2498/34 and 204/35. Extended 1939. Red brick in Flemish bond, pantile roof on steel trusses.

PLAN: A broad-fronted 'H' plan, with symmetrical front, the central single-storey range set back from the two-storey bedroom wings. The central range long and shallow, with central hall flanked by the main reception rooms - a long ante-room to the right and two rooms to the left, approached by the long corridor at the rear. The main dining room lies at right angles to this range across the corridor but central to the ante-room. To the left, rear, are kitchen and services, with a small two-storey bedroom block. The transverse corridor is taken through short links to the bedroom blocks, which are double-banked, with central corridor.

EXTERIOR: All roofs are hipped, with parapets to the reception range and the dining room. All windows are timber sash with glazing-bars, to flush boxes, with brick voussoirs and stone sills. The central range has a slightly stepped forward central 3 arched bays to brick piers, over set-back pairs of glazed doors with radial fanlights, all to a one step full-width stone landing; the parapet is taken higher than to the flanking sections, in five bays with large 29-pane windows (grouped 3 + 2), with 2 similar windows on the end returns; to the right one of the windows has a pair of doors inserted below the upper sash. There are 2 plain square ridge stacks to the centre section.

Short low-level links, each with 2 pairs of glazed French doors, connected to the 2-storey blocks. The short ends have three 12-pane above a central arched, part-glazed door flanked by 12-pane, and at the eaves, tall paired stacks linked at the top over an arched opening. The long returns are in 12 bays, with 12-pane to each level. There are walls and gates enclosing internal courtyards to rear.

INTERIOR: Original joinery including panelled doors throughout. The square entrance hall has pairs of glazed doors open to the corridor each side at the rear. The mess rooms are richly appointed with cornicing, bolection-moulded panelling and fireplaces. Floors are in polished wood strip. Dog-leg staircases have turned balusters to a solid string, and heavy square newels.

HISTORY: In Britain, and in contrast to newly-independent countries such as Finland and mostly modernistic styles adopted by those municipalities commissioning terminal architecture, the planners for the post-1934 expansion of the RAF were enjoined to soften the impact of new bases on the landscape by politicians mindful of public concerns over the issues or rearmament and the pace of environmental change. In 1931, the Air Ministry had been instructed by government to consult over the issues of airbase design with the Royal Fine Arts Commission, all of whose consultant architects and planners had cut their teeth in the late Victorian period: one of their number, Sir Reginald Blomfield, was an outspoken critic of modern architecture and its threatened erosion of regional traditions and another was the distinguished country house architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.

These influences were especially marked in the standard officers' mess of the post-1934 expansion of the RAF, designed by an architect appointed as a result of this liason. A fine composition, externally in original condition, typical of this period in its neo-Georgian style. It also clearly shows the impact of the Royal Fine Arts Commission on designs of the post-1934 Expansion Period, but especially the 'guiding hand' of Sir Edwin Lutyens in its careful grouping of openings, and in the paired chimney stacks. It was planned according to the principles of dispersal, establis