The Station: Charles Tegart’s Policing Through Architecture in the British Empire

One of the most fruitful outcomes of the “global turn” in architectural discourse is an attention to comparative scholarship that reveals how architecture becomes an idea as buildings move across time and space. Within this body of scholarship is a place for studying the built environment’s often overlooked or seemingly unexceptional dimensions. As a modern building type, the police station’s origin story is eclipsed by the Enlightenment reimagining of more monumental spaces such as the hospital and prison. However, police stations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries served as important everyday centers where the empire encountered colonized peoples. Using the life history of an imperial policeman, Sir Charles Tegart, as a throughline, this article takes up the subject of police architecture constructed throughout the British Empire with a focus on Ireland, India, and Mandatory Palestine. By examining specific features of Irish and Indian police buildings as antecedents for Tegart forts, the highly militarized police stations constructed in Palestine in the 1940s, this article explores the necessity of establishing a transnational framework for police architecture to better understand the broader history of British occupation. Police within the British Empire were a mobile population, as were the engineers and architects overseeing police building projects. The lessons learned from studying the entangled relationships between the built environment and the forced movements of people under imperial regimes are a powerful rationale for the importance of global architectural histories.