Number 9 Store (Building Number 1/35) Portsmouth, England

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

SU 6200 SE MAIN ROAD (West side) HM Naval Base 774-1/18/212 No 9 Store (Building No. 1/35)

GV I

Naval store. Opened 1782. By Templar, Parlby and Templar (Riley). Red brick, in English bond; ashlar dressings. Flat-topped mansard slate roof with leaded top. PLAN: rectangular plan with central ground-floor entry and stair. 3 storeys with cellar and attic, 13 x 3 bays. EXTERIOR: ashlar plinth and 1st-floor band and sill band; stepped brick eaves band below plain ashlar cornice; coped parapet. Ground-floor doorways round-arched ashlar surrounds with keystones rising into 1st- floor band, plinth blocks, and imposts. Windows are 18-pane sashes, 12- pane to 2nd floor, with gauged bright-red brick flat arches and ashlar sills; flat roofed attic dormers. Rainwater pipes with bulbous heads. North-east elevation: bays arranged 5:3:5 the centre projecting slightly below pediment with oculus. Blocked central entrance in architrave with tripartite keystone, flanked by windows. Doorways to other ground-floor bays have double doors, decorative fanlights with glazing bars and round- arched ashlar surrounds with plinth blocks, imposts, and keystones rising into deep 1st-floor band. Rear: as north-east elevation, but ground-floor openings of right half bricked up. Returns each have central entrance and loading door above, with double doors, fanlights with radial glazing bars, cantilevered landings to loading doors (that to left return now removed), and housings for cranes. Building surrounded by raised pavement of granite slabs carried on iron arches at front and brick plinth at rear, with iron grilles above cellar windows (formerly trap doors on rear side). INTERIOR: cellar: transverse brick walls between bays carry round-arched brick vaults; passage along rear side. On floors above, square wooden columns support large-scantling cross-beams and joists; wide wooden floorboards; some of the original woodwork replaced on 1st floor. Central wooden stair rising from ground to 2nd floor has open well, closed-string, shallow (replacement) treads, wide-spaced large-scantling plain balusters, square newels, and broad handrail. Roof board-lined with braced queen-post trusses of large- scantling timbers. HISTORY: the last of three large stores (with Nos 10 and 11 qqv) forming a notably fine group. Much of the Georgian yard was taken up by stores, and these are the most architecturally-distinguished surviving examples in any of the naval yards. (Sources: Coad J: The Royal Dockyards 1690-1850: Aldershot: 1989: 132-136; The Buildings of England: Lloyd D: Hampshire and the Isle of Wight: Harmondsworth: 1985: 410 ; The Portsmouth Papers: Riley RC: The Evolution of the Docks and Industrial Buildings in Portsmouth: Portsmouth: 1985: 7, 10).

Listing NGR: SU6299200361