Shipshape at Chatham Historic Dockyard

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10 April 2012

If working on historic buildings is a form of surgery, the £13million rehabilitation of the 17th century Smithery at Chatham Historic Dockyard is more like necromancy. This building has not so much been refurbished, as brought back from the dead.

The Chatham Historic Dockyard is the most complete historic dockyard from the age of sail anywhere in the world. It is a remarkable place, opened in 1613 and now available to Londoners in just 40 minutes from St Pancras station — the high-speed route is one of the bonuses of the Channel Tunnel rail link.

The dockyard has many attractions, but as you might expect from a 80-acre installation that the Royal Navy left as recently as 1984, there are swathes of it that do not feel like a modern visitor attraction. There are still bits of ship lying around, buildings that have seen better days, and a quayside (complete with tourable warships) that still has a lot of heavy work going on, carried out by a small army of volunteers.

That, in these days of overbranded historical sites, is generally a positive thing, and the pleasure of the architecture of the site is in observing the make-do-and-mend attitude to building that characterises historic military sites. But until recently, the dockyard has had no climate-controlled galleries that could take touring exhibitions or preserve objects more fragile than the 2,000-ton submarine that lies in one of Chatham's dry docks.

Trying to create such an environment in the old Smithery was a profound challenge. In 2003, when architects van Heyningen and Haward were given the task of proposing new uses for it, the building had a Harris Fence perimeter preventing anyone getting too close, lest the 17th-century brick facade should topple over and inspire a lawsuit. Inside the building, where for more than three centuries there were roaring furnaces and smiths hammering away at pieces of metal, there were seven-feet buddleia and only the barest remnants of a roof.

Look at it from the outside today, and it looks a bit like — and I mean this positively, believe or not — the result of a piece of plastic surgery by a particularly heavy-handed quack doctor. At first glance, you can see that something's not quite right about it, but you can't tell quite what. Then you notice lines of bricks canting from horizontal to 45-degree angles as the brickwork meanders across the front of the building.

This is all to do with ground conditions and the degree of damage that the old walls had suffered after years of water pouring in through the jerry-built roof. But the evidence of evolution and repair in the building's walls is now part of the charm. Inside are countless iron railings, loops, ladders and shelves, the original uses of which are lost in time. The new project has preserved these.

However, the main work has been significant new construction within the envelope of the repaired Smithery, to provide the gallery space that the dockyard required. The brief was to house a collection of more than 4,000 models of ships previously held in storage by the National Maritime Museum and the Imperial War Museum (the Smithery project is a partnership between these two national institutions and the Chatham Dockyard Trust).

Van Heyningen and Haward's proposal did not propose upgrading the entire building to the museum conditions necessary for this delicate collection but proposed new boxes within the envelope of the historic building that can be temperature- and humidity-controlled. There are three of them, one with a dark interior and finely wrought glass cases for the public display of the models, and two more with dense shelving inside to store the thousands of models of this huge and unwieldy collection (these latter two will be inaccessible to the public). There is a room for private study, too, that can be booked by researchers to study particular models in close detail.

If you think a display of historic ship models sounds a little nerdy you'd be right, but these magnificent works of art are a long way from Airfix. The largest of the models is seven feet long, and most of them average three or four feet of timber, metal and wire. Many of the ship models were design tools, helping ship engineers understand the efficiency of aerodynamics and planning the various decks. Latterly, they also became pieces of marketing material, as Britain's shipbuilding industry began to provide ships for the world's navies. So, there are curiosities such as huge steamers encased in a Japanese-style lacquered case.

There are also some very exotic models, such as the star of the show, a model of Nelson's Victory carved from mutton bones by French prisoners of war from the Napoleonic era. The rigging is rendered in the prisoners' own hair. The explanations of the artefacts are brilliantly done throughout the new display, juxtaposing artworks and interactive tools that really bring this collection alive.

Another important part of the scheme is the temporary exhibition gallery, which is now the best of its kind in the region, and will allow the dockyard to receive touring exhibitions from major galleries and museums. The first is the spectacular paintings by Stanley Spencer of the Clyde dockyards and their workers, which, although a little histrionic for my taste, depict some of the punishing hard work and searing heat that would have characterised the Smithery building itself for much of its working life.

The architecture throughout exhibits a modest and light touch, and its success is in preserving some of the romance of the ruined version of this building. This is perhaps most evident in the Pipebending Floor, the room where complex shapes were made out of lengths of metal. On the walls are evidence of the previous uses of the building, and van Heyningen and Haward has resisted any strong interventions here but has worked hard to preserve and contextualise the remains. I can also say that while these spaces look relatively untouched, there has been a massive amount of careful work by client, curators, engineers, architects and volunteers to get them to this state.

Chatham Historic Dockyard is now part of a very rich architecture-inspired day out and very convenient. Just a stop before Chatham is Rochester, with its cathedral and castle dominating the skyline. But continue on to the historic garrison town of Chatham, and the dockyard should be your first stop.

The site is hemmed in by a dual carriageway and offensively bland housing around its fringes, and the local authority needs to work on the unprepossessing route from the train station to the entrance.

But once you are inside the dock walls you have a dockyard seemingly frozen in time, with lines of barracks, housing for officers, a spectacular rope works and a number of slips with naval relics in impressive numbers. The No 1 Smithery is at the heart of the site, and the new fulcrum of a great visitor attraction.

Chatham Historic Dockyard is open daily 10am-6pm. Admission £15 (conc available). Information: 01634 823 800, thedockyard.co.uk. Trains to Chatham depart from St Pancras every half hour.

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