Woolwich Police Station - Market Street, Woolwich, London, UK
N 51° 29.410 E 000° 03.821
31U E 296158 N 5708424
This 1910 building was constructed as the Woolwich Police Station and is still used for that purpose today. It is located on the south west side of Market Street near Woolwich Town centre and the Magistrates Court.
Waymark Code: WMG3Q0
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 01/08/2013
Views: 1
The building is Grade II listed and the
entry at the English Heritage website [visit
link] tells us about the building:
"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.
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."