North Sutor, Coast Battery

This building, which is situated on a grass-grown platform cut back into a steep S-facing slope, measures 8.86m from E to W by 3.6m transversely over walls up to 0.31m thick and 3.05m high. It exhibits two phases of construction, both sharing the same rectangular ground plan. The earlier phase has been built of smooth concrete walls measuring 1.16m high. Its interior is divided into two unequal compartments with concrete floors, the smaller at the W end, each accessed by a broad doorway with chamfered edges in the S side. The later phase of reconstruction is denoted by the use of white concrete bricks on top of the earlier wall, this adding 1.89m to the building’s height on the SSW and 1.29m on the NNE. The gables confirm that the roof sloped gently downwards to the NNE and debris in the interior indicates that it had been clad with asbestos tiles. The second phase of work has seen the doorways in the S side decreased in width and both compartments provided with a window, that in the smaller compartment narrower than that on the S side of the E compartment. Both windows and doors originally had wooden lintels. A rectangular vent is situated in the SSE gable just below roofline and another occurs high up between the widow and doorway in the same compartment. Two short lengths of small diameter metal piping that enter the building through the W gable, are almost certainly conduits that once carried electricity cables.

The building is shown on plans of the North Sutor held by the National Archives at Kew (WO78/5192), one of which is dated to 1 May 1913. The first phase may have provided unroofed storage, possibly for coal and earth, as the building is much the same size as the store used for this purpose at Site No. 1 (NH86NW 22.15). The coal would have been employed as a fuel, while the earth might have been used in earth closets. However, the second phase, together with the latrines situated 75m WSW (NH86NW 9.43), which are also built using the same concrete bricks, possibly dates to WWII, as similar brickwork is used in the secondary phase of the building (NH86NW 9.13) that housed the oil tank immediately S of the W engine house at Site No.1, the engine house associated with the counter bombardment battery observation post (NH86NW 9.08) and the secondary phase of the engine house at Site No.3 on the South Sutor (NH86NW 11.19). However, it is shown roofless on an aerial photograph (106G/RAF/0751/6039) flown on 31 August 1945.

Visited by HES, Survey and Recording (ATW, AKK, KLG), 28 March 2019