At first glance, the No. 3 Slip Cover at Chatham is a very large wooden shed and Britain has never been short of those, but this one has rather more going on. Built in 1838, it was designed to shelter ships while they were being constructed on the slip beneath, protecting the timber from rain, sun and the general damp enthusiasm of the Medway. When you’re building wooden warships, you don’t really want them getting damp before they’re ready.
The building was designed by Sir Robert Seppings and the curved apse at its landward end was designed to accommodate a ship’s bow. Although buildings of this kind were constructed around the world, there aren’t many surviving and that’s not surprising as they’re not the most subtle arrangement.
There was a lift up here, but as I’m an athlete, I decided to walk up the stairs. I wondered at the time what this floor was doing here in a huge building designed to build ships, but it was added in 1904 to store boats when the whole arrangement became more of a storage shed.
This photo of underneath the mezzanine floor shows the scale of the building. As I had arrived early in the day, there were no other visitors in this area yet, it had a feeling of being a forbidden space with all this junk (or exhibits as the museum might call them) around.