Drawing of Laboratory Square by an unidentified British draughtsman, working in a common 18th-century style of an angled aerial perspective that divorces the site shown from any realistic surrounding context. The view is from the north, where the wrought-iron gate shown, with the royal arms above, opened out onto the Thames. The towered gateway is at the landward or south end. Ordnance stores were first set up at the Royal Dockyard at Woolwich in the 16th century under a directive of Henry VIII, who founded the yard on the west side of the village. The first recorded building on the present Royal Arsenal site, on the east side, was a mansion called Tower Place, built in 1545, which lay just north of the enclosure shown here (roughly at the bottom right corner of the drawing) within an area known as the Warren or Woolwich Warren. Gun manufacturing and proofing then took place within the City of London, but a more isolated area was desirable and from the 1650s guns were tested at the Warren. In 1671 Tower House and the adjacent land was bought by the Crown for use as ordnance stores and in 1696 the Royal Laboratory was built for the manufacture of munitions and fuses, though gunpowser was not made there. By that time the Warren was the largest gun repository in the country and in 1717 the surviving Brass Foundry building, designed by Vanbrugh, was added to the south of the Laboratory for the manufacture of cannon, replacing the former London foundry in Moorfields. From 1741 Tower House was the first home of the Royal Military Academy before it moved to Woolwich Common. By 1757 only 169 men worked in the Laboratory , but by 1777 it and its surrounding area covered 104 acres, employing almost 500. The complex was renamed the Royal Arsenal in 1805, following a suggestion by King George III during a visit in that year. The only parts of the Laboratory that survive today are the pair of double-storey buildings towards the south of the square shown here. These were fully restored as part of redevelopment of the Arsenal site in 2015.