Portsmouth Historic Dockyard: the ships, the museums and the history

Portsmouth Historic Dockyard: what is inside the gates

Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is the corner of a working naval base that the public is allowed into. HM Naval Base Portsmouth is still the home port of a large part of the surface fleet, including the two Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers, and the historic area sits in its south-west corner behind Victory Gate on the Hard. In 1985 the Ministry of Defence, Portsmouth City Council and English Heritage set up the Portsmouth Naval Base Property Trust and gave it a 99-year lease on this 12-acre site, which was fenced off from the operational yard. The trust looks after the historic buildings and small boats, while the ships and museums are run by their own charities, the largest of them the National Museum of the Royal Navy.

The result is an unusual place to spend a day. Four historic ships are berthed close together, in dry docks and alongside the harbour wall, surrounded by Georgian storehouses and Victorian workshops. Warships of the modern Navy are moored a short way up the harbour, and from the waterfront you can often see a carrier or a frigate beyond the museum ships.

What follows is an evergreen guide to the site: what each attraction is, how the dockyard came to exist and how to get there. Opening times, ticket types and temporary exhibitions change, so check the official website before you travel.

The four historic ships

HMS Victory

Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar has been in No. 2 dock since January 1922 and remains a commissioned warship, flagship of the First Sea Lord. A long conservation programme is under way, and visitors walk among the scaffolding and down to the hold. Her full story, from Chatham to the present repair, is on our page about HMS Victory.

The Mary Rose

Henry VIII's warship was launched in 1511, served for 34 years and sank off Spithead in the Solent on 19 July 1545, leading the attack on a French invasion fleet. Her wreck was found in 1971 and raised on 11 October 1982. About a third of the hull survives. It sits in a dry dock inside a purpose-built museum, opened in 2013, with thousands of objects recovered from the wreck displayed alongside: weapons, tools, clothing, musical instruments and the belongings of the crew. Read more on our Mary Rose page.

HMS Warrior

Launched in 1860 and completed in 1861, Warrior was the first armour-plated, iron-hulled warship in the world. After half a century as an oil jetty in Wales she was restored at Hartlepool and opened in Portsmouth in 1987, moored beside the harbour station. Her history and her second life as an event venue are told on our HMS Warrior page.

HMS M33

The smallest of the four is a First World War monitor, a shallow-draught gunboat built in 1915 to bombard coastlines. M33 supported the landings at Suvla Bay during the Gallipoli campaign and served in Russia in 1919. She is one of only three Royal Navy warships of that war still in existence and the only surviving Allied ship from Gallipoli. After decades as a minelaying training ship, fuel hulk and floating office she was conserved and opened to visitors on 7 August 2015.

Museums, boathouses and galleries

The National Museum of the Royal Navy has had a museum in the dockyard since 1911, housed in the old storehouses. Its galleries cover the Navy from the age of sail to the present, and the Nelson and Victory galleries are given over to Trafalgar and the men who fought it. One of Victory's own sails from 1805 survives in the collection, its foretopsail, holed by more than ninety shots. It is too fragile to stay on show and is brought out for special occasions.

Boathouse 4 is a boat shed begun in 1938, whose construction was halted by the Second World War; a temporary corrugated iron wall put up then is still there. It now holds a collection of small military craft from the twentieth century, among them Motor Gun Boat 81 and RAF High Speed Launch 102, and it is a working boatbuilding space where traditional skills are taught.

Action Stations, the interactive centre in the Victorian Boathouse 6, closed in February 2025 so the building could be rebuilt as a new museum of the Royal Marines. Across the harbour in Gosport, reached by waterbus, are two more museums in the same group: the Submarine Museum, with HMS Alliance, and Explosion, the museum of naval firepower at Priddy's Hard.

Eight centuries of a royal dockyard

Ships have been built and repaired at Portsmouth since Richard I ordered a dock here in 1194, and King John had walls built around it in 1212. The decisive date is 1495, when Henry VII had the first recorded dry dock in the world built at Portsmouth, a dock that could be pumped out so that a hull could be worked on in the dry. The first warship built in the yard was the Sweepstake of 1497, and the Mary Rose followed under Henry VIII.

The dockyard grew with every war against France. Most of the brick buildings that frame the visit date from the eighteenth century: the three great storehouses beside the Camber, built between 1764 and 1785, and the Great Ropehouse, a double ropery more than 1,000 feet long. Around 1800 the yard was the largest industrial site in the world. Under Samuel Bentham, Inspector General of Naval Works, it gained new stone docks, steam engines and the Block Mills, where Marc Brunel's machines made ships' pulley blocks by mass production, the first steam-powered factory of its kind. Between 1905 and 1906 the yard built HMS Dreadnought, the battleship that gave her name to a type, in a year and a day.

For centuries the dockyard was the centre of working life in Portsmouth, and the town grew up around its wall. This site's own subject, the Portsmouth folk singer Shep Woolley, is introduced on our history page, and every guide on the site can be reached from the home page.

Getting there by train, ferry and on foot

The simplest way to reach Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is by rail. Portsmouth Harbour station is the end of the line from London Waterloo, a journey of around an hour and a half, and Southern runs services along the coast from Brighton. The official dockyard guidance puts the station about 200 yards from the entrance: Victory Gate is a short walk along the Hard. The station itself is worth a glance as you leave. It opened in 1876, stands over the water on iron supports, and HMS Warrior lies right beside it.

The Hard Interchange next to the gate handles most national coach services and local buses, and ferries from Gosport and the Isle of Wight land within a few minutes' walk. Drivers should follow the brown tourist signs for the dockyard and not the satnav, which tends to send cars to the gate of the operational naval base. Inside, the site is flat and compact, but going aboard all four ships and seeing the museums properly fills a full day.