The Architectural Documentation of British Colonial Prefabricated Wooden Heritage: A Case Study of a Nigerian National Monument

The British colonial contact with Nigeria was dotted with diverse paradoxes. In the realm of architecture, it was a period punctuated with the importation of prefabricated buildings into many slave and palm oil trading towns, such as Old Calabar in southern Nigeria. Unfortunately, today, many of these prefabricated colonial architectural heritages have gone into extinction, except for a few which are also on the verge of collapse. One of the remaining few on the verge of collapse is the Egbo Egbo Bassey House built between 1883 and 1886 and declared a National Monument of Nigeria in 1959. Currently, there is no literature on the historical and architectural data of this building, besides those scattered over several files in archival records. Therefore, this paper aims at the holistic documentation of the National Monument. Two categories of data were considered in the documentation processes—namely the building historical data and geometrical data. Historical data were collected through archival research and interviews, while the geometrical data were collected through close-range photogrammetry and manual measurements. The result of this paper contributes to the current geographical dearth of literature on British prefabricated architectural heritage, which punctuated a very important period in the architectural history of the world.