Watergate House, Chester
   HOME

TheInfoList



Click Here for Items Related To - Watergate House, Chester
OR:
Watergate House, Chester on:   [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Amazon]

Watergate House is in Watergate Street, Chester, Cheshire, England. It is recorded in the
National Heritage List for England The National Heritage List for England (NHLE) is England's official database of protected heritage assets. It includes details of all English listed buildings, scheduled monuments, register of historic parks and gardens, protected shipwrecks, a ...
as a designated Grade II*
listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...
.


History

Watergate House was built in 1820 as a
town house A townhouse, townhome, town house, or town home, is a type of terraced housing. A modern townhouse is often one with a small footprint on multiple floors. In a different British usage, the term originally referred to any type of city residence ...
for Henry Potts,
Clerk of the Peace A clerk of the peace held an office in England and Wales whose responsibility was the records of the quarter sessions and the framing of presentments and indictments. They had legal training, so that they could advise justices of the peace. Histo ...
for the County of Cheshire. It was designed by Thomas Harrison. In 1907 it became the headquarters of Western Command. After the command moved to the new Command Headquarters in Queen's Park Road in 1938, Watergate House then became the headquarters of the Cheshire Community Council, and has since been used as offices.


Architecture

The house is constructed in
Flemish bond Brickwork is masonry produced by a bricklayer, using bricks and mortar. Typically, rows of bricks called ''courses'' are laid on top of one another to build up a structure such as a brick wall. Bricks may be differentiated from blocks by siz ...
brown brick with stone dressings and a grey slate roof. It has two storeys plus a basement. The plan of the main block is square, with the entrance in a recessed convex quadrant at the northeast corner. A service wing projects to the south. Six curved steps lead up to a curved eight-panel door with four-pane sidelights and a three-pane overlight. The door is surrounded by an Ionic doorcase. Above this, in the upper storey, is a twelve-pane sash window in an architrave, the bottom panel of which is inscribed with aa crown flanked by initials "E" and "R". Both storeys on the east and north sides contain three twelve-pane sash windows. On the west (garden) front is a central two-storey
bay window A bay window is a window space projecting outward from the main walls of a building and forming a bay in a room. Types Bay window is a generic term for all protruding window constructions, regardless of whether they are curved or angular, or ...
containing sash windows, flanked by sash windows in each storey. The entrance door leads through a domed circular lobby to an octagonal central hall.


See also

*
Grade II* listed buildings in Cheshire West and Chester There are over 20,000 Grade II* listed buildings in England. This page is a list of these buildings in the unitary authority of Cheshire West and Chester. List ...
*
List of works by Thomas Harrison Thomas Harrison was an English architect who flourished in the last two decades of the 18th century and the first three decades of the 19th century. Little is known of his early life, and his precise date of birth is not known. He wa ...


References


Further reading

*{{Citation , last1 = Hartwell , first1 = Clare , last2 = Hyde , first2 = Matthew , last3 = Hubbard , first3 = Edward , author3-link=Edward Hubbard , last4 =Pevsner , first4 =Nikolaus , author4-link =Nikolaus Pevsner , series= The Buildings of England, title = Cheshire , publisher =
Yale University Press Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day, and became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and operationally autonomous. , Yale Universi ...
, year =2011, orig-year=1971, location =New Haven and London, pages = 266–267, isbn =978-0-300-17043-6 Grade II* listed buildings in Chester Grade II* listed houses
Watergate House The Watergate scandal was a major political scandal in the United States involving the administration of President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1974 that led to Nixon's resignation. The scandal stemmed from the Nixon administration's continual ...
Neoclassical architecture in Cheshire Thomas Harrison buildings