Port Royal, Spanish Town, and Clarendon: challenges for Jamaica’s built heritage

This lecture focuses on four important buildings in Jamaica. The Old Naval Hospital in Port Royal has been largely vacant since 1988. Built of brick and cast-iron it is an important example of Jamaica’s built heritage. In Spanish Town, Manchester House is a late eighteenth-century brick and timber house. Once a prominent residence in Spanish Town, it has been vacant since the turn of the century and is slowly crumbling. Cave Valley Sugar Estate in Clarendon has a striking brick and stone chimney on a part of the estate which has been abandoned. Through a lack of care and attention, it is another example of the challenges to the built heritage of the island. Finally, the Garrison Building in Port Royal is an early nineteenth-century timber structure which operated as a military laboratory. It was badly damaged in the 1988 hurricane.