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Home - Lattice House History
We are indebted to Captain A. L. Mansfield for the background information given below. Captain Mansfield visited W&D at Lattice House a number of years ago and sent a letter as follows:
"In 1926 Mr Tom Thornycroft was Works Director and Mr Norman Endacott was Works Manager at John I Thornycroft Ltd in Basingstoke.
In the General Strike of 1926 Mr Thornycroft put some of their own Thornycroft buses on the road and some services were operated. This ‘venture’ developed into a bus company to be called Venture Ltd.
In the early thirties, Mr Tom Thornycroft and Mr Norman Endacott left the Thornycroft Works to devote their time to Venture Ltd. I (Captain Mansfield) took over the engineering side of Venture in March 1937.
Later in 1937 Venture took over W.E. Kents bus business at Heath End and it was decided to build a garage. Mr Thornycroft wanted a wooden building and specified a ‘Belfast’ roof. This request followed Mr Thornycroft’s experience of such a structure which had covered a large area of the Thornycroft Works".
This letter filled in the origins and distant past of Lattice House. A Belfast Truss is a technique for building a strong but lightweight wooden ‘girder’ out of smaller sections of wood with a supporting lattice work and with nailed joints. These can be clearly seen on the picture above. Very large spans can be bridged with this method of construction. The use of solid beams would be impossible due to the mass and lack of support. The beams at Lattice House of which there are eight are close to 27 meters long. Pre WWII aircraft hangers used the same technique. Anyone visiting the RAF Museum at Hendon in North London will see good examples of this.
When the Hampshire buses stopped using Lattice House in the mid eighties it was initially used by a hire company as storage for their equipment. A local builder had ownership of the freehold. He discovered that the Belfast Truss wooden roof was worthy of preservation in that it was the widest such span that he could find using this technique in the south of England if not the whole UK.
On the basis of this information he obtained a continuation of the planning for B2 use on the understanding that the roof structure would be preserved. He sold the site on to a Basingstoke developer called Thor who then undertook a complete refurbishment of the site but with the original roof being kept as part of the new structure and with it being put on display. This was circa 1987.
Wood & Douglas formed in 1978 and were trading from premises on Young’s Industrial Estate and were searching for a new site for their activities. One of the key factors in their search was for somewhere that had character and tranquillity. Discussions were put underway quite quickly with Thor.
The new building sits under the original roof and is around 1 metre smaller creating an overhanging effect. The total floor area is 950 square meters. In order to allow two storey’s to be accommodated under the roof, large amounts of earth had to be dug from the site. The sale completion took place in Autumn of 1989.
Lattice House is unique and distinctive, lending itself completely to Wood & Douglas's creed of stunning design and remarkable engineering. Should you visit we hope you will leave with a lasting memory of this stunning building.
