Heritage Statement and listed building consent for refurbishing a Grade II* barracks by James Wyatt.

Every room and every window.

A refurbishment that touches every room of a Grade II* building needs to be assessed room by room. The Heritage Statement was therefore supported by a gazetteer in four parts, one for each house in the first phase, recording the fabric of each room and grading its significance, and by a schedule of some forty window bays, each photographed.

The windows were dated by the profile of their glazing bars and by the presence or absence of horns, checked against a photograph of 1866, and colour-coded on the elevations as Georgian originals, two patterns of Victorian replacement, or modern. That gave the design team a clear order of priority, with the original sashes first in line for repair.

The archive, and what opening up revealed.

The research drew on the tithe map of 1840 and Ordnance Survey editions from 1865, on engravings of the 1840s and 1860s, and on the collections of the Royal Engineers Museum, including nineteenth century photographs and the drawings for a modernisation of the block in 1956.

The picture that emerged was of a building whose plan is essentially as Wyatt left it, with four rooms opening off a central stair in each house, on load-bearing masonry walls, but whose interiors are largely modern. Targeted opening-up works, notified to the council in advance, found no original lath and plaster ceilings, and the doors and partitions proved to be recent. The significance lies in the masonry walls, the surviving staircases, the exterior, and the original sash windows.

New services through old routes.

That understanding shaped the scheme. Services were routed through existing runs and penetrations, avoiding the floor joists. Kitchenettes were placed against the rear external walls. All historic masonry walls and door openings are retained, modern plasterboard ceilings are replaced with fire-rated ones, and modern doors give way to panelled fire doors. We attended the design team meetings throughout, and met the council’s conservation and planning officers on site before the application was made.

The Heritage Statement concluded that harm would be less than substantial and at the lower end of that scale, confined to new penetrations for services, and outweighed by the benefit of keeping the building in its original use and in good repair.

Listed building consent (MC/25/2122) was granted on 29 January 2026 with four conditions, none of which had to be discharged before work could begin. The Heritage Statement, gazetteer and window schedule are named on the decision notice. We have continued to advise during the works, including on scaffolding fixed through window openings so that no ties needed to be drilled into the brickwork.