Tour Portsmouth

Portsmouth Hotel Deals
Find the best deal, compare prices and read what other travelers have to say at TripAdvisor

London's Lost Route to Portsmouth The Portsmouth and Arundel Canal was an extraordinary speculation and an ignominious failure. Built to safeguard coastal shipping from French privateers and the hazards of the Foreland passage, the outcome of Waterloo and the development of steam vessels transformed its prospects.

Home of the Fleet: A Century of Portsmouth Royal Dockyard in Photographs During the past century, the Royal Navy and its support services at Portsmouth dockyard have experienced a pace of change not seen since the fifteenth century. This book examines the impact of that change on the ships, buildings and personnel of the naval base. The dockyard has evolved continually as a support service, reinventing itself in response to changing social, economic and political circumstances. The authors look at the dockyard's role in times of conflict, from the First World War to the 1991 Gulf War, and consider the effects of privitisation and cutbacks. Portsmouth is now ready to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century when it will be the Royal Navy's premier base. Richly illustrated with photographs from the Royal Naval Museum and Historic Dockyard collections and exclusive, newly-commissioned photographs, 'Home of the Fleet' will appeal to anyone who is interested in Britain's naval heritage.

Maritime City: Portsmouth 1945-2005 (In Old Photographs) Like so many towns and cities, Portsmouth has undergone numerous changes since the Second World War, having to accommodate the car, replace many old and outworn houses, accept the demise of old established industries, and to come to terms with dramatic change in retailing, which has seen the demise of many small food shops and general stores and the rise of the supermarket and superstore. But Portsmouth is essentially a maritime city, a very special one at that, for at its centre - indeed the reason for its existence - is the naval dockyard. For centuries the town flourished in times of war, but the introduction of missiles and nuclear submarines in place of many conventional craft caused employment to fall from 25,000 in the early 1950s to 2,000 at the end of the twentieth century. Yet, against all expectation this contraction has been absorbed without undue difficulty. The idea for this book stemmed from an exhibition of photographs assembled by the Portsmouth Society to celebrate the millennium. "Maritime City" paints a fascinating picture of the Portsmouth that many have forgotten, and at the same time provides a record of the changes, which have occurred over a wide spectrum of the city's life during the last half-century.

The Portsmouth Block Mills: Bentham, Brunel and the Start of the Royal Navy's Industrial Revolution The Block Mills in Portsmouth Naval Base have long been known to students of naval and industrial history. Within this group of buildings a remarkable set of machine tools designed by Marc Brunel to manufacture ships' blocks laid the foundations for the subsequent world-wide development of industrial production-lines that used ever more sophisticated machinery to replace the work of individual craftsmen. In a very real sense, the modern world of factory mass-production using machine tools had its origins in this Georgian building overlooking the heart of the dockyard. The importance of the pioneering work in the Block Mills was recognised by discerning contemporaries and the building swiftly became an object of pilgrimage for many, its fame assured by its inclusion in a number of major 19th century encyclopaedias. Block-making ceased here in 1965, but a number of the machines still survive, in Portsmouth and in the Science Museum, while the Block Mills still remain much as completed in the first years of the 19th century, the interiors little altered. This book has been written to coincide with the bicentenary of the installation of the final set of block-making in the Spring of 1805. It covers the construction and use of the building and its machinery and aims to set the Block Mills in the wider context of late Georgian dockyard modernisation. Further research in the Goodrich papers has revealed much hitherto-unknown information on the crucial early years of this pioneer venture. It is hoped that this book will draw attention to this remarkable building which has stood largely empty for nearly forty years.

Return To Tour Hampshire