In­ter­na­tion­al Coun­cil on Mon­u­ments and Sites (ICO­MOS) T&T, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Cit­i­zens for Con­ser­va­tion, is cel­e­brat­ing In­ter­na­tion­al Day for Mon­u­ments and Sites with a se­ries of ar­ti­cles fea­tur­ing her­itage build­ings in the T&T Guardian.To­day is the third in­stal­ment in the se­ries and fea­tures St James Bar­racks, St James.

The theme for the In­ter­na­tion­al Day for Mon­u­ments and Sites is the Her­itage of Ed­u­ca­tion.Through­out his­to­ry and in dif­fer­ent geo-cul­tur­al con­texts, ed­u­ca­tion was prac­tised in a wide range of places or build­ings.Open spaces, or the pro­tec­tive shad­ow of a tree, could be use­ful for the trans­mis­sion of knowl­edge, but so too were spe­cif­ic in­sti­tu­tion­al build­ings, such as schools, uni­ver­si­ties, church­es, acad­e­mies, li­braries, monas­ter­ies, etc.

Many of those build­ings, groups of build­ings or sites are recog­nised as bear­ing, not on­ly so­cial or in­sti­tu­tion­al val­ues, but al­so his­toric or artis­tic ones and have there­fore be­come a sig­nif­i­cant part of our cul­tur­al her­itage.ICO­MOS T&T seeks to raise pub­lic aware­ness of the full di­ver­si­ty of cul­tur­al her­itage places and land­scapes of na­tion­al or lo­cal sig­nif­i­cance.

For fur­ther in­for­ma­tion on the day, pre­vi­ous themes, sup­port ma­te­r­i­al and the cal­en­dar of ac­tiv­i­ties around the world, go to the In­ter­na­tion­al Day for Mon­u­ments and Sites page of the ICO­MOS In­ter­na­tion­al Web site.

St James Bar­racks

In about 1804, the Or­ange Grove Es­tate, site of to­day's Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, was ac­quired by the British gov­ern­ment, on which the Or­ange Grove Bar­racks were es­tab­lished for the 59th Reg­i­ment of the British Forces. In 1819, at the re­quest of his Ex­cel­len­cy Lord Comber­mere, KCB, Gov­er­nor of Bar­ba­dos and Com­man­der in Chief of His Majesty's forces in the West In­dies, Gov­er­nor Sir Ralph Wood­ford pur­chased lands for the es­tab­lish­ment of the new bar­racks in St James.

The Or­ange Grove site was con­sid­ered less healthy than the clean­er coun­try air of St James and was aban­doned when the St James Bar­racks were built.The foun­da­tion stone for the bar­racks, which can still be seen on the north-east­ern cor­ner of the south block, was laid on May 13, 1824. Con­struc­tion was com­plet­ed on June 11, 1827.The de­sign is typ­i­cal of the neo­clas­si­cal British Colo­nial style.

Named af­ter the Court of St James, the St James Bar­racks is per­haps the old­est gov­ern­ment build­ing still in use in Trinidad and To­ba­go af­ter near­ly two hun­dred years, and is now the home of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Train­ing School.

The heav­i­ly and clas­si­cal­ly colon­nad­ed Bar­racks and the sur­round­ing en­vi­ron­ment were a favourite sub­ject for Trinidad and To­ba­go's nine­teenth cen­tu­ry artist Michel-Jean Caz­abon and his stu­dents, in par­tic­u­lar Mar­garet Mann, wife of a mil­i­tary of­fi­cer at the time of Gov­er­nor Lord Har­ris in late 1840s and ear­ly 1850s.