Portsmouth has been a pretty big part of naval activity for Britain for the last 800 years, and naval history is something I don't know much about so I was pretty excited to visit and learn about the naval exploits of Britain over the years. Well excited!
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| Even more gooberish than usual. |
So there's the
HMS Victory, in permanent drydock at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyards. Launched in 1765, Victory was the flagship of Nelson's fleet during the
Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Even today compared to modern warships, it is an impressive sight - three decks of kitted out cannon. It towers over you, it is easy to see how awe and terror inspiring it would have been in its active days.
It's the off-season in Portsmouth this time of year - there was a lot of repair work, and I suspect they got E grade tour guides for the off season too, because boy howdy, that guy was garbage. He did that classic 'please save your questions until the end' thing, then took off so as to avoid answering anything. What a dick.
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| One of the gun decks. I have tonnes of photos, if you care hit me up. |
The ship was really interesting, seeing how they moved the gunpowder about and lived and that. Not a lot of romance in it, awful! I liked how they just grabbed any poor sod from anywhere to be sailors and smacked them around if they didn't do what they were told - pretty much slave ships.
Down the way, there's another ship, one of its kind, the
HMS Warrior.
1860, the Warrior is the first British combo ironclad - the centre section is a big steel box ('citadel'), where all the important parts of the ship are protected. No weaponry of the time could penetrate the armour. Left as an oil hulk for much of its life, it's been restored and can now be used for events and weddings and that.
I like that they call them hulks when they're just sitting around, makes them sound cool. Oil Hulk 17.
It's great having these two historic ships so close to one another, it's easy to compare 130 years of development in ship building.
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| Quite stylistic but completely done for function, runners for gun placement, swivel and mounting! This was one of the first breach-loaded cannons (ie. firing a shell rather than a cannon-ball). |
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| They were gearing it up for a big Christmas meal event that night, £200 a ticket! |
They also have the
Mary Rose at the dockyard, this one having formerly belonged to Henry VIII. Sunk in 1545. Which is just out of control really, again interesting to be able to see 400 years of naval development there! It was pretty amazing seeing how much they could learn from what was saved (only half the ship survived, buried in silt).
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| Those're the decks of the Mary Rose. The black tubes are part of the preservation process, they've replaced every molecule of water with resin as if the timber dried out now it'd just crumble into dust. Those tubes are dehumidifying I think. |
That doesn't look like much - opposite they have items that were recovered along the length of the ship. So you have old cannon with Henry VIII's mark on them, tools and things. The kicker for me was seeing these strongboxes full of English Longbows - and they looked mint.
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| 500 year old Longbows |
As part of the Dockyard ticket you get a little harbour tour, which was fun too - being out on a boat again, lovely. The skipper was right up my alley with his terrible puns. But yea, showed us around, told us about Portsmouth's booming role in banana imports, saw some of the navy ships, old and new.
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| "Should be in Wales, as they're full of leeks" |
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| This big dog was going to be shipped to Turkey to be stripped, I thought it looked a little tragic. |
The dock is a melancholy place in many respects, a former site of such national importance, now just importing bananas and storing retired vessels - but I guess that's change for you.
The dockyard explored, I decided to walk to my hotel since it was only 20 minutes away. So I set off in the darkening gloom, to arrive and realise,
20 minutes to the flash ibis, not the budget ibis. So add another 30 min on there and I arrived at the Portsmouth FC and my hotel, opposite a KFC and a McDonalds. I did not eat well.
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| I did a little calculation and for a similar price to my one room in an old drafty flat in London, I could have an ensuite shower room in a central Portsmouth hotel, cleaned daily by someone else. |
Saturday I set off to the Esplanade, to visit the Marine Museum.
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| The stony Portsmouth esplanade |
If there's a wrong way to walk, I'll go that way first. I walked 20 minutes toward town before doubling back. Nice to be on the coast and hear the waves lapping on the shore though! Portsmouth has a pier with the whole rides and stuff set up, coffee available all along the boardwalk. The walk extends 6km on either side of the historic dockyard I think - it'd be lovely in summer.
The Marine museum was interesting, covering how the outfit has developed over the hundreds of years of naval technology, formation of the commandos etc. The British have been involved in many more modern (and historic) scuffles than I ever knew about!
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| I quite liked this poster. Good guy Government! |
Heading back to the city, I popped in to the D-day museum, as Portsmouth/Gosport was the launching platform for the invasion. Their centrepiece is the
Overlord Embroidery, 83 metres of embroidery depicting D-Day planning and invasion. Bizarre! I didn't spend much time there, but there was a section of what it was like for Portsmouth people and that was interesting.
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| Sherminator. |
After that I wandered along the waterfront soaking in the sights and the rain, made it to Gunwharf Quays retail area which is quite well done I think. For the evening I decided to go to The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug. It's a long film, is all I can say.
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| Almost arty. |
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| Southsea Castle, 1544. |
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| The wind picked up, was fun watching the various boats making their way through the heads. That's actually the boat I did the tour on I think. |
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| Memorial to those lost at sea. |
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| As far as retail areas go the Gunwharf Quays shopping centre is pretty good. |
Sunday saw me potter through the central city to see what I could see. The main shopping streets aren't bad, open air pedestrian malls, christmas market stalls set up. All the modern shops, everything's in Portsmouth. I figured it'd be quicker to buy togs here than in London, so I got some from Primark. Putting my backpack down to put the togs in, I raised it to find I had disturbed a puddle of yellow water. I don't fault the guy, when you've gotta go you've gotta go, but I didn't want it on my back! So I wandered to a park and dragged the bag through the mud and grass to wash the piss off.
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| Christmas stalls! |
Wandering to Victoria Park, the place was deserted. I spotted a squirrel, and I thought - is this the day I can take the time to take a closeup squirrel face picture?! The elusive shot. So I'm standing there with my camera and suddenly I am surrounded by five squirrels, and then one climbs my leg. It was
awesome.
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| SQUIRRELS ARE SO CUTE. |
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| The Guildhall |
My interest in museums was waning, so I wasn't going to go to the city museum - but when I chanced upon it I thought I should pop in. They had an exhibit on Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in Portsmouth), and a great wee bit about living in Portsmouth, local history and stuff which was fairly interesting. Paintings of the docks and ships from history was also interesting, in that respect it was good to go here later in my trip so I could recognise stuff. When I left it wasn't raining, bonza.
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| City Museum |
I popped through Old Portsmouth too, which was much the same as regular Portsmouth I thought, just with cute cobbled streets. Of course it's on the coast, and it was very windy and pissing down so I don't think I enjoyed it as much as I might've! I visited some holy sights in the area.
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| Royal Garrison Church. |
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| Portsmouth Anglican Cathedral |
My final port of call, and I will say the highlight of my trip, was the Royal Navy Submarine Museum. To get there I took the Gosport ferry, a 4 minute ferry trip from Gunwharf Quays that saves you a 45 minute bus trip. From there, a 10 minute stroll past a fort and an extrememly large marina and you're at the museum.
I'd never seen a submarine before so this was something else:
Barely a soul in sight, the museum has a midget sub cut at a cross-section so you can see inside, and the Holland 1, the first submarine of the Royal Navy (1901) - which you can go inside of. But that pic there, that's the
HMS Alliance.
The ticket price includes a tour of the inside of the Alliance, and the tour guides aren't some snotnosed kids - they're actually former crewmen (she served until 1976). My tour group was just me and another guy, and the other guy worked on Vanguard submarines (the current nuclear ones) so that was pretty badass. Our tour guide was a most enthusiastic and friendly chap with decades of submariner experience, and used to serve as the cook on Alliance (as well as other duties). It was absolutely fascinating, everything was still there, and everything is mechanical. Hearing about life on board and what happened in certain areas from a man who actually knew, it was just fantastic. A real hidden gem.
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| Engine room |
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| View up the corridor to the forward torpedo room |
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| Control room |
That big unit on the right, our guide shared a hell of a story about that. It's a device for remotely controlling torpedoes (via a trailing wire) - the buttons on the bottom right are for 'left and right', and up and down in the middle, just like a Nintendo. Anyway, they fired a live torpedo, and once the torpedo picks up a target with its own sonar they cut the control wire loose with another button. Just as they were about to cut it loose, the sound guys picked up an incoming torpedo - the torpedo had done a 180 and was targetting the ship! So they frantically tapped 'down down down' to the torpedo, what else could you do, and sent it shooting down into the depths, never to be seen again. I would've gone to Portsmouth just for that submarine.
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| A big daddy and I |
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| A pirate and I |
