Listed Building: NUMBER 24 STORE (BUILDING NUMBER 1/117) (1244580)

Stores and workshops, now one. 1783, with later alterations including C20 2nd-floor addition. Red brick in Flemish bond with ashlar dressings. Hipped slate roofs. PLAN: two free-standing parallel ranges running west-east, the intermediate linking courtyard later roofed over to form one building. EXTERIOR: 3 storeys; 17x 9 bays. Ashlar plinth, 1st-floor band and flat coping to parapet. Tall 18-pane sashes in reveals with gauged flat brick arches and stone sills; shorter fixed 12-pane metal windows to 2nd floor. Wide panelled double doors with louvred vents at top in wooden architraves with console-bracketed cornices. On 1st floor, loading doors in quoined, raised, ashlar surrounds with cornices. Rainwater pipes with bulbous heads. South elevation: bays arranged 2:5:3:5:2, the ends and centre projecting (formerly under pediments, as No.25 Store (qv)). Doorways to bays 5, 9 and 13, the -latter replaced by a window. Central loading door now a window. Rear: similar, but right-hand doorway has lost cornice and has an inserted loading door above; central1st floor loading floor now a window; fire escape added across centre. West elevation: bays arranged 3:3:3, centre is recessed and has round- arched doorway; pedestrian entrance on right has wooden cornice. Each outer section has central doorway as before. Inserted loading door to centre of 1st floor. East elevation partially obscured by addition linking this building to No.25 Store (qv), but 2 entrances as before. INTERIOR: on ground floor square chamfered wooden posts on wooden pads support large-scantling beams. HISTORY: originally one of 4 similar stores and workshops built to a courtyard plan, one of a planned group of C18 stores as part of the dockyard modernisation programme. The central open area was used for storage. This block was the south-western one. The south-eastern and north-western blocks survive as No.25 and No.33 Stores, Main Road (qqv): the north-eastern block, much-damaged 1940s, as Building No. 1/149 (not included). They are of interest as an attempt to rationalise dockyard workshop activities in a formal arrangement of self-contained buildings. (Sources: The Buildings of England: Lloyd D: Hampshire and the Isle of Wight: Harmondsworth: 1985: 414 ; The Portsmouth Papers: Riley RC: The Evolution of the Docks and Industrial Buildings in Portsmouth: Portsmouth: 1985: 10 ; Coad J: Historic Architecture of HM Naval Base Portsmouth 1700-1850: Portsmouth: 1981: 36, plate 30 ). Selected Sources Books and journals Coad, J , Historic Architecture of H M Naval Base Portsmouth 1700-1850, (1981), 36 Pevsner, N, The Buildings of England: Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, (1967), 414 Riley, R C, 'The Portsmouth Papers' in The Evolution of the Docks and Industrial Buildings in Portsmouth, (1985), 10