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Strong Island Portsmouth’s History in Brick and Stone Portsmouth and its districts. The city has grown from an original nucleus in Old Portsmouth to encompass a patchwork of distinctive districts, each of which grew up around what had originally been a rural hamlet or village. Strong Island Portsmouth’s History in Brick and Stone Paul L. Knox First published 2020 Text, design and layout copyright © 2020 Paul L. Knox Photographs copyright © 2019 Paul L. Knox, except as noted on page 197 Cover image: Dr A. Velez All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author is pleased to acknowledge the support of Virginia Tech in the preparation and publication of this volume. Thanks also to Chris Knox, Sue Smith, and Anne-Lise Velez for their enthusiastic support and assistance in undertaking fieldwork, and to John Burden for helpful comments and suggestions on drafts. Any remaining errors are of course my own responsibility. Contents Introduction: Changing Cityscapes 6 1. Pre-Modern Traces 14 2. Company Town 30 3. Pax Brittanica 56 4. War ... War 122 5. Reconstruction 148 6. Regeneration 175 Further Reading 196 Photo Credits 197 Index 198 6 Introduction: Changing Cityscapes The history of Portsmouth was writ large across the city’s face – street after street of tightly-packed terraced houses pushing outward from 1 the naval dockyard ... 1 Hurley, G., The Take. London: Orion, 2010, p. 33. ach chapter in a city’s economic, social, and architectural history leaves its mark in the layout of its streets, the fabric of its buildings, the Enature of its institutions, and its sense of place. Many of these features can be understood as the product of the broad sweep of history, and most of them are shared by cities throughout the country. They are the legacy of successive cycles of economic development, of the imprint of changes in trans- portation and building technologies, and of the effects of demographic, social, cultural, and political change. In addition, most cities have also acquired local landmarks that lend character and identity to their cityscape. Meanwhile, a few cities are the product of an exceptional story that has produced a particu- larly distinctive cityscape. Portsmouth is one of these cities, with a built envi- ronment and sense of place that are the legacy of its highly specialized role in national history and its unique physical setting – as well as the more general processes of urban development that have shaped other British cities. Like many other provincial cities, Portsmouth grew from a small medieval core, surrounded by villages and hamlets that would eventually become the nuclei of distinctive districts within the modern city. Similarly, Portsmouth’s overall development, as with other British cities, reflects the influence of the Industrial Revolution, its buildings recording, on the template of pre-modern streets and field boundaries, the consequences of new modes of economic and social organization, new technologies, and new tastes in architecture. With an economy that for decades was so heavily dependent on Dockyard industries, Portsmouth is in many ways more typical of the industrial north than of other cities in the south of England. As in Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds, speculative developers put up street after street of terraced housing for the new working classes of the Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, for the new and rapidly expanding middle classes, privacy was paramount and this was expressed in a very different form of development: suburbs of detached or semi-detached villas. Trams and railways allowed for both physical spread and spatial segregation, and the motor car supported the addition of inter-war semis, suburban shopping parades, and industrial estates. (opposite) HMS Warrior, The Hard. 7 ■ Strong Island As in Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Coventry, Hull, Liverpool, London, and Plymouth, all this was significantly altered as a result of heavy bomb damage during the Blitz. In the aftermath of the Second World War large tracts of heavily damaged properties and poor quality housing were cleared to make way for new development, much of it in the image of the Welfare State: social housing estates, slab blocks, Spithead and the narrow entrance to midrise flats, modern schools, and clinics. Portsmouth Harbour. Easily defended, Then, with the precipitous retreat of the Welfare State from the late 1970s the the narrow entrance gives access to a deep and extensive anchorage that was development of the city has been driven, as in most other provincial cities, attractive to the Roman navy and, later, vital to the Royal Navy. by a mixture of regeneration and gentrification. With each of these successive phases of urban growth, surviving tracts of early cityscapes became hybridized as new buildings replaced old, plots were amalgamated or sub- divided, and street layouts were modified. Portsmouth’s built fabric has been adapted or redeveloped as generations of families have gone through their life cycles; as successions of socio-economic and ethnic groups have moved in or moved on; as lifestyles have changed; and as the decline of Dockyard industries has been succeeded by new patterns of economic activity. The finer grain of Portsmouth’s cityscape reflects the succession of national architectural trends that are evident in every provincial city. Pre- industrial wooden buildings gave way to the strict symmetry of plain brick frontages, tall windows, and pedimented doors of Georgian architecture, and this in turn gave way to stuccoed Italianate and neoclassical styles. Victorian aesthetics were reflected variously in regressive Gothic Revival, Arts and Crafts, and Domestic Revival styles, while industrialization and consumer culture brought entirely new kinds of buildings and land uses: factories, warehouses, institutional buildings, department stores, tea rooms, dance halls, theatres, hotels, public gardens, sports stadiums and amusement parks. Elements of all of these survive in every city, amid more recent layers of modern urban development. Portsmouth’s ut beyond these broad parallels with other British cities Portsmouth’s Distinctiveness Banatomy and cityscape are distinctive, shaped as much by a unique physical situation and the tides of war and peace as by economic, social, and architectural history. The unique configuration of the coast formed what was to become one of the world’s greatest anchorages. Sheltered by the 8 Introduction ■ Isle of Wight, the Solent’s twin entrances create an advantageous tidal pattern at Portsmouth, with a seven-hour flood and a five-hour ebb that scours the narrow entrance channel of Portsmouth Harbour as water retreats from the 15 square miles of its deep water and creeks. In the Solent itself, the course of the drowned Quaternary-era Solent River provides a deep-water channel that is convenient for shipping, while the extensive offshore shallows of Horse and Big Harbours, narrow entrances. Dean Sands and No Man’s Land ensure large areas of comparatively calm A unique physical geography was the water either side of the deeper anchorage of Spithead. basis for a distinctive setting for urban development. The harbour has been an important strategic asset for centuries. Successive monarchs fortified the harbour entrance and the town. Walls and ramparts were extended, updated and renewed with the onset or the threat of every new round of hostilities. Surrounded on three sides by tidal water, con- strained on the fourth by a creek and the steep backdrop of Portsdown Hill and with building land limited by marshy edgelands, the city was never able to spread out around a central core in the kind of radial pattern typical of other cities. Assymetrical in shape and multi-centred in layout, it was forced to be one of the most densely inhabited cities in Britain. Its fabric was strongly influ- enced by successive epochs of national geopolitical history, framed within fortifications and developed mainly to service the naval base. For centuries, Portsmouth’s whole economy was geared to supporting the Naval Dockyard. In the most formative age of the city’s development, the occupational and wage structure of the Dockyard – one of the largest and most innovative man- ufacturing complexes in England in the mid-nineteenth century – meant that Portsbridge Creek. Portsea Island’s modest terraced housing became the overwhelmingly dominant element of natural separation from the mainland has been reinforced by a nineteenth- the cityscape. Middle-class districts and affluent enclaves, on the other hand, century moat and bastions and a 20th were noticeably under-represented. century motorway. Under Admiralty jurisdiction the Dockyard was largely self-contained and so failed to spark the kind of capital accu- mulation typical of other industrial cities. Government-run, the Dockyard did not generate profits that could be channelled into local investment. Nor were there many opportunities for Portsmouth entrepre- neurs to expand and prosper by way of Dockyard supply contracts. For reasons of 9 ■ Strong Island economy and quality control the Admiralty followed a policy of self-sufficiency as far as possible, engaging outside contractors only for basic raw materials. For much of the nineteenth century, convicts were deployed in many of the Dockyard

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