Monument record 16081 - Smallwood Women’s Land Army Hostel

<1> Historic England, 2011, The National Heritage List for England, 1465440 (Web Site). SCH6528.

Land girls generally worked on their own and lived in lodgings, or were billeted on the farms where they worked. However, to counteract isolation and occasional poor treatment, hostels were also established in pre-existing buildings, ranging from country houses to stables. From 1942, new ‘hutment’ hostels were built, like the one at Smallwood, and housing up to forty-eight women. They were staffed with orderlies and a warden or matron; many were run by local YWCA (Young Women's Christian Association) or other volunteer services. There were some minor variations in plan, but all consisted of inter-linked ranges with a cruciform, H, or T-plan, comprising a dormitory, dining and common room, kitchen, matron’s room, sick room, bathroom and showers, toilets, and a boiler room, with a header tank tower. In addition there were often lean-to stores and outbuildings to house bicycles, tools, farm machinery and tractors.

Smallwood is a typical purpose-built hostel for the Women’s Land Army (WLA, better known as the land girls), housing women who travelled up to several miles to outlying farms. Its construction exhibits ‘utility’ principles, for example in the use of timber jointing methods not requiring carpentry skills, in the use of bricks on edge for the inner skin of external walls to reduce the overall number of bricks used, and in the minimal heating via pipes without radiators, and coke stoves. The hostel was built in 1942, but due to damp problems the first girls stationed here soon had to move out. Few returned when the hostel was ready again, and replacements moved in. It was occupied until at least 1946. It was described in 1942 as ‘a new built brick barrack with cold concrete floors. Coke stoves and a coke boiler provided heating but there was none in the dormitories’.

In the late-twentieth century the dormitory and ablutions block was converted to pigsties. This involved adding dwarf walls inside the original bedroom partitions, with embedded iron railings enclosing the front of the former open bays. Only in the north-east of the dormitory block does an internal partition appear to have been removed, indicated by the broken ends of the hollow-tile blocks which are still keyed into the north wall. In the ablutions area, the former toilet area has had its wall taken down to one metre high, and the doorway filled in to create another pen. Washbasins have been removed from the walls although at least two of these are still in the building, and the dividers between the showers have been removed from the wall. The rest of the hostel has been used for storage and for raising chickens with little physical alteration. The cubicles in the south end of the dining block have been removed, as indicated by the scars of their walls in the concrete floor and western wall, and the mixture of surviving battens for shelves and witness marks of the same in the paint on the same wall. Their doors however appear to survive, stacked in the kitchen. The small fireplace on the east wall of the dining room has been removed, and some areas of the fibre-board ceiling have fallen.