Sheerness Dockyard

In the Age of Sail, the Royal Navy would often establish shore facilities close to safe anchorages where the fleet would be based in home waters.[2] In order to operate more effectively, the Navy Board began to explore options for developing a new dockyard at the mouth of the Medway, able to be accessed by ships directly from the North Sea and Thames Estuary.[2] In March 1665, following a declaration of war against the Netherlands, Peter Pett (the Resident Commissioner at Chatham) had a wooden storehouse built within a compound on the promontory of Sheerness, for the better provisioning of the warships anchored at The Nore.Samuel Pepys, who was Clerk of the Acts of the Navy Board, issued authorisation for the works to begin and later recorded visiting Sheerness to measure out the site for the new dockyard.[3] Pett had further plans for the development of the site, including a dry dock in place of the careening facility; he also advised fortifying the area to the north of the yard.Progress in this regard was slow, however, and it was not until early 1667 that the Board of Ordnance asked Sir Bernard de Gomme to assess the ground and draw up proposals.[3] The King and the Duke of York visited the site in February of that year, and (after further refinements were made to the design) building work began on 27 April.[6] The situation was overtaken, however, by the escalating Anglo-Dutch conflict: on 10 June 1667 the still-incomplete fort was easily captured, together with the adjacent dockyard, by the Dutch Navy and used as the base for a daring raid on the English ships at anchor in the Medway.After their stocks of guns, ammunition and naval stores had been plundered both the fort and the dockyard were left in flames, along with a significant number of the ships moored in the river.A gateway through this wall, accessed from the dockyard, provided the main entrance to the fort; the gatehouse was a prominent feature and contained a chapel on its first floor.A scarcity of available housing, the absence of a nearby water supply and the likelihood of contracting ague from the surrounding marshland all led to a lack of workers and caused construction delays.[7] In 1796, following the development of Blue Town, a wider area of land (including the new houses) was enclosed behind a bastioned trace, which was further strengthened during the Napoleonic Wars of the following century.[4] The Board acceded to the request and soon afterwards built four barrack-like lodgings for workers (such as shipwrights and artificers) alongside the naval store yard within the walls of the fort.The site's quicksand and mud banks provided a substantial civil engineering challenge; thousands of wooden piles had to be put in place to support the inverted arch foundations of the docks, wharves, basins and buildings.Sheerness was unusual among Dockyards in the unity and clarity of its design, having been built in one phase of construction, of a single architectural style according to a unified plan (rather than developing piecemeal over time).[16] The site was approximately triangular in shape when viewed from the air: Rennie's perimeter wall (1824–31)[17] was built south-east from the Boat Basin (at the northernmost tip of the yard) running parallel with the Thames Estuary foreshore as far as the main gate, after which the wall (as can still be seen)[18] turned southwards past the officers' houses, before turning sharply and continuing in a westerly direction as far as the river (though deviating south again at one point to accommodate the mast houses at the southern end of the site); the river then made up the third side of the triangle.[19] The principal buildings and structures were laid out along the bank of the Medway; from north (i.e. Garrison Point) to South, these were: The Great Basin, with its three dry docks, formed the Dockyard's centre of operations; they were designed to accommodate First Rate Ships of the Line.The area between the residences at the east end and the basins and docks to the west was initially kept clear, in large part, to allow for storage of timber; though the artesian well (dated, on the Well House, to 1800) which had so transformed life in the old Dockyard, was located here in relative isolation.On a long narrow strip of land was built officers' accommodation, guard houses, barrack blocks, a parade ground and (within the bastion at the southern end of the site) a gunpowder magazine.This marked the start of an era of fast-paced technological change, and in the 1840s massive expansion took place at Portsmouth and Devonport to provide new basins and docks, which were served by factories, foundries, boiler-makers, fitting-shops and other facilities for mechanical engineering.Most particularly, because Chatham Dockyard was not expanded and adapted for steam until the 1860s, Sheerness found itself under pressure to provide interim facilities for repair and maintenance of steam-powered ships based in the Nore.This became an immediate priority with the outbreak of the Crimean War: so in 1854, a new Steam Factory was built 'in haste' at Sheerness by Godfrey Greene, with the second mast house being converted into an engineering foundry and fitting shop.[33] Greene built a second Smithery in 1856, alongside the first, this time with an all-metal frame; a technique he took to new heights in 1858-60 with the building of a four-storey Boat Store (behind the Working Boat House), remarkable for its size, for its 'efficient storage and handling arrangement' and above all for its remarkable structural innovations: 'The all-metal frame was made rigid by portal bracing, subsequently adopted by the skyscraper pioneers in Chicago, and universal for modern steel-framed building'.[42] A campaign by Save Britain's Heritage saw the former dockyard placed on the World Monuments Fund watch list in 2010, noting that: 'Despite terrible losses, the site still contains a wealth of historic buildings.